Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community?
On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 06:37:03AM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
The difficult cost of trying to have a voice as a Debian user is *not* the commitment, it
is enduring the ad hominem attacks when I express my opinion. Of course if I cannot
overcome the stigma of the ad hominem attacks, my voice is completely nullified
by those ad hominem attacks. And they continue. Michael Stone followed me to
this list and condemned for me asking questions here on this list. There is no way
*he* considers me a member of the Debian community who has a formal voice as
a Debian user.
Since you've been complaining about how people react to your messages
for quite some time, perhaps you might change the way you write your
messages?
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994899#5
When people give you negative feedback, you announce that they are
"attacking" or "defaming" you.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/09/msg00785.html
And the pattern continues with new messages periodically complaining
about debian, followed by "oh, I understand now" type messages, then the
same complaints get recycled again later.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/08/msg00370.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/09/msg00267.html
There are a lot of walls of text that just don't seem to ever lead
anywhere. In the message I'm replying to you wrote 90+ lines, took the
time to call me out for "attacking" you, asked some rhetorical
questions, but never explained a particular problem that debian might be
able to address. You want other people to read volumes but show no sign
of changing based on the feedback you get, repeatedly complaining about
'bugs not being fixed' without mentioning what bugs so people could
actually engage with you on why a particular bug might not have been
fixed. (You did it yet again in the message I'm replying to--after
specifically stating at the start of this thread that your last thread
on the topic degenerated so you were going to switch lists and focus on
something different!) I can't see how we can possibly improve your
experience with debian until you stop the long meta-discussions about
vague concerns and find a way to clearly communicate what problems we
might help you to fix. If you want better results, keep your
communications direct and actionable.
In fact, this is basically what you were told a year ago in one of the
threads where you complained that you were being attacked:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994899#10
"You've filed a new bug so make the exact problem the primary part of
this bug. Don't ask of others to read a '50 page document' and expect
them to distill YOUR problem themselves. Doing a copy+paste of the
*relevant* part is absolutely fine."
You have now sent a message about a particular udev issue to debian-user
and I replied with one immediate thought. Some more thoughts: you're
using a fairly obscure configuration. Most people running interactive
VMs (e.g., on a desktop with a graphical console) aren't using Xen,
they're using kvm or virtualbox or just about anything else. People
running Xen are much more likely to use something like debootstrap
rather than going through an installer. So the number of people who 1)
can duplicate the problem and 2) are likely to do so, is pretty small.
The reality is that this will affect how much attention the problem
gets. As mentioned several times, by several people, you have a tendancy
to write enormous volumes of text. Just reading the logs of the bugs
associated with your issue was exhausting. There are no concise
summaries, there are no small patches to help identify/isolate an issue.
(There is, for example, a 1700 line patch in 994899 which basically
reverts an entire set of functionality; maintainers generally prefer
minimal and well understood changes. The eventual fix from upstream
corrected several issues but didn't rip out all the associated
functionality to do so.) It's not enough to say that something like that
fixes a problem for you, unless it's clear what the effect would be on
the set of people whose systems are currently working but who might be
negatively affected by the change. For your udev problem I would
probably focus on why the runtime behavior is different than the
installer behavior, and try to make the installer behave like the
runtime. (Runtime doesn't require kernel patches, etc., so it seems
unlikely those are necessary to fix the problem.) If you can isolate
that to something you can express clearly and produce a patch to correct
you'll probably get a positive response. If you continue to send massive
volumes of roundabout reports, then complain that you aren't getting
enough attention, it's much less likely that anyone will choose to spend
time working with you on this.
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