At 2022-09-16T19:12:40+0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 08:47:19AM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > > That's easy to explain why your bugs are fixed quickly. You are a > > DD, so your bugs are important. I am not a DD so my bugs are not as > > important to the maintainers who have a greater responsibility to > > respond to a DD's bug than to an unknown user's bug. > > That's a completely wrong interpretation that you are drawing here. > No, that's not really the reason here. The reason is rather that > people _do_ work on bug reports regardless of who reported them, but > you somehow do not want to acknowledge the fact that package > maintainers do work on bug reports. As a person of gray Debian beard (but of sufficiently low profile to have been forgotten about as a developer), I encourage diligent volunteers to _not engage_ with people who, whether intentionally or not, seem determined to increase the amount of friction in processes and to make themselves into tar pits for anyone who attempts to engage with them constructively. That said, such people define "constructively" in an odd way, as can be seen above; they assert that the only way they experience respect is to be _obeyed_. They claim that they are treated as second-class citizens because they are not deferred to like monarchs--or dictators. I advise people to be watchful for this pattern because you can be sucked into an energy-sapping dynamic that reduces your channel capacity as a volunteer and dilutes your enjoyment of (what should be) a collaborative environment. I think we can take substantial value from basic game-theoretic models of behavior: if a person defects more than they cooperate, don't play with them. We should ask ourselves, what does Chuck Zmudzinski contribute to raising Debian's barn?[1] The answer isn't necessarily "nothing"; maybe it's "application of an angle grinder to the base of an erect load-bearing post". Bugs can take a long time to get fixed and sometimes you have to do it yourself. For your amusement and as a case in point I refer the reader to one I had forgotten about for many years. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=243238 Among other things, Debian is a software engineering organization. We can benefit ourselves and our community by becoming better software engineers. And indulging in "simple sabotage" of production less.[2] I would emphasize that the list in that oft-cited resource is not an enumeration of activities that must be avoided at all costs in all circumstances. I find it useful instead as a diagnostic tool in the DSM sense; for example, if you find a person doing at least two of these 16 things at least once in every meeting (or some applicable time interval), then they may be functioning as a drag on production--even if they see themselves as heroically frustrating the rolling Panzers of the wicked Axis power that is the Debian Project. The obvious defects of the most vilified regimes of the 20th century were that they had too much anarchism, too much democracy, and left too much to individual initiative. Imagine the tragedies that could have been averted if they'd had a BDFL like Chuck Zmudzinski. Regards, Branden [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/oss-manual-sabotage-productivity-2015-11
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