Re: Privacy and defamation of character on Debian public forums
On 9/25/2021 10:02 AM, Andy Smith wrote:
Hello,
On Sat, Sep 25, 2021 at 09:06:34AM -0400, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday, September 24, 2021 05:31:47 PM The Wanderer wrote:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994899 - specifically.
the first reply (comment 10).
[…]
I've read over message #5, and without being a Debian developer or a user of
Xen, aside from being a little longer / wordier than probably necessary, I
don't see anything so objectionable about it.
[ I am not a member of the Debian Xen team and haven't contributed
anything to this particular bug, but I have followed it all as I
have an interest in the team's work. ]
It's not outrageously objectionable, it's just not a very good bug
report with some *slightly* objectionable elements and background.
This whole thing is pretty mundane and has been blown out of all
proportion by Chuck failing to handle reasonable advice given by
someone trying to help in good faith.
I don't doubt at all that the advice in message #10 was given
in good faith. I thought the author of #10's decision to rudely
refuse to collaborate with me forever by saying "Bye" in a later
message was also an overreaction to anything wrong I might
have done.
Also what would have remained
with a very niche audience (people interested in Debian's Xen
packages) has now been shown to a much wider audience as a
consequence of Chuck bringing this to the attention of debian-user.
To explain a bit more of the background, you'll see that Chuck
referred to another bug in that bug log and a lot of other
discussion took place there. Some of the things that are wrong with
Chuck's bug are that Chuck criticised the Debian Xen team for
including particular patches, and made some other factually
incorrect statements,
For example?
and wrote in a style as if as if the situation
were fully known about by the Debian Xen team while valiant users
like Chuck are crushed underfoot.
I admit the Debian Xen Team may not have been aware
of the situation, and besides, I was more concerned that
the Debian Release Team did not notice that patches from
an unstable branch of the Xen upstream source made it
into the Debian stable release. There is what I would call
a "Debian patch" exploit attack surface exposed here to the
authors of malware. THAT is a serious issue. The Xen Team's
patches in question are perfectly acceptable in unstable and
maybe in testing, but IMO, not in stable.
In reality, the Debian Xen team didn't have good visibility of the
issue and it's not yet been proven where exactly the bug lies. Even
if it was shown to be in a patch that the team HAD taken on
questionable basis, so what, we are all volunteers here, there is no
need to berate people for their good faith efforts,
I think its an overstatement to say I "berated" anyone in the
bug report. You, however, judge me as "damned" and as a
"laughingstock" in your first reply to my original post. That also
is an overstatement of anything wrong I might have done,
don't you think?
we should expect
bug reports to just focus on finding and fixing the bug not as
someone's platform to deal out a blame narrative.
Agreed.
Basically it's not a big deal and could have easily been turned
around; I felt #10 was a fairly gentle request to focus on the facts
and make progress but to say the criticism was not received well
would be an understatement!
I am truly sorry, are there second chances in the Debian Community?
For example, one of the "strongest" statements in #10 is
"It's good that you filed this bug against the Debian Xen
package […] way you went about it ... not so good."
Chuck's response to that seems to have been to go about complaining
in multiple unrelated locations of how he has been accused of being
"not good". Note that he's morphed a statement of "your bug report
was not done in a good way" into "someone in the Debian community
told me I was not a good person; remove their slander or risk being
sued". A dramatic misrepresentation of what actually happened. The
rest of it is full of things like that.
Are you trying to say now I am not a good person? Seems so to me.
It could be partially understandable if #10 had simply said, "your
bug report sucks," which believe me, I have seen and continue to see
even from long standing Debian Developers. But Diederik did also
take the time to give useful advice about HOW to move the situation
forward, in fact that was the majority of the response.
I really appreciate Diederik's input, my point was I would have
preferred he contact me in private about any criticisms he had
for me personally before criticizing the way I wrote my bug
report in public. That is what I would have done if I wanted to
criticize him. But he is the one who made the first criticism
of a Debian volunteer in PUBLIC. So to defend myself, it had
to also be in public. That is why defamation is not the only
issue to discuss here. The other is privacy and whether or
not Debian volunteers can discuss matters privately or does
every criticism we have about another person need to
be expressed in the public forums?
I'm not sure which message Chuck wants deleted -- #5 or #10 (if either), but
I'm not sure he has "standing" to ask that #10 be deleted -- it seems he would
have to contact the writer of message #10 and ask him to ask that message #10
be deleted.
I hope #10 is not deleted as it contains a lot of useful advice for
anyone else who experiences this bug and wants to help resolve it.
I'd also say that I can see Diederik is still working on narrowing
down where the bug lies,
He is probably seeing the other bug, not the bug I reported, but the
best fix would probably fix both bugs.
so the work of Diederik and potentially
others on the bug in question clearly isn't over,
That is probably the other bug, because the bug
I saw on my hardware is already solved, I DID
find a fix for it.
it can just
now proceed without Chuck's further input.
No need. My bug is fixed, not in the official release, but
with my patches which I shared with the community in
both bug reports. Debian is free to find another solution
that also solves the other bug, and if the other bug
is solved, I will test it and see if it also solves my bug
so I can go back to running the "official" Debian released
version instead of my patched, unofficial version.
Though Chuck did clearly say that he wanted #10 deleted and
apparently now says that he has agreement that it will be from
someone official:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/09/msg00802.html
I remain sceptical that this is an accurate report of whatever
discussion that Chuck has had with the powers that be. :)
Cheers,
Andy
Same to you,
Chuck
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