On 08/31/2015 02:33 PM, The Wanderer wrote: > Also, while I agree that Lennart is not out "to get us" in the sense of > malicious laughter and diabolical plans, he _does_ seem to outright > reject some principles which have been valued in the free-software world > for decades, to want to see those principles crushed to whatever extent > they interfere with his own goals, and to have zero sympathy or respect > in practice for those who do value those principles. The end result may > not be all that different. I think that you are - unintentionally - assuming bad faith here, by claiming Lennart doesn't have any sympathies or respect for other people's opinions. How would you know that? Yes, he's done things that you disagree with, even after he was made aware that people feel strongly about them. But that does not imply a lack of respect or sympathy for the opposing position in and by itself, it just implies that he does not share certain ideas, even after having been confronted with them, or maybe he does share them, but considers another conflicting principle to be more important for a given decision. To give a trivial example of this (and this example may not be valid anymore, it's been over 10 years that I last tried FreeBSD, so please just take it as an example and don't read too much into it): Let's say I write a piece of software with a command line interface and one of the BSD people comes to me and says: please parse command line options like BSD tools do, i.e. abort parsing after the first non-option argument (so that options can't be appended to the end of a command line), because this is much more in line of how POSIX specifies that command lines should work. If I decide against that and rather use the GNU handling of command lines, that allow options to be specified after non-option arguments (e.g. "ls /etc -l"; BSDs will treat the -l as an additional path to be examined by ls, not as an option), because I think the GNU handling is a much better user experience, does that mean I don't respect the principle of following POSIX? No, I just think that the principle of having a better user experience (which is obviously also subjective) is more important here than following POSIX to the letter. Or take another example: the GCC team's past reluctance to modularize the compiler, in order to make it harder for proprietary vendors to exploit it. Here you have two principles working against each other: having a modularized compiler that makes writing other software that processes code (e.g. IDEs, etc.) easier - or making sure that code using the compiler stays free software. Richard Stallman and the GCC team decided that the latter was more important than the former, but does that mean that they didn't respect the other side? > Agreed. For what it's worth, I don't think this particular iteration of > the discussion has gotten nearly as heated or as hostile or as harmful > as many of the previous ones have done. Sure, but I would rather come to the situation where people can air their honest disagreements here without resorting to name-calling, greatly exaggerated hyperbole and assumptions of bad faith. And while this has not been the worst exchange on this topic, the very first posting in this thread is a prime example for people assuming bad faith. Just look at the title of this thread and thus the framing of the discussion. Instead of talking about what actually happened (that there's a new alternative to su that fits slightly different use cases) the title claims that su will disappear. Note that _nobody_ working on su, neither upstream nor maintaining it in distributions, has claimed that they will stop. Christian
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