On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 10:49:02AM -0800, Anthony Towns wrote:
> MJ Ray wrote:
> >That reminds me of one thing that has annoyed me during tbm's
> >leadership (sorry tbm! You have done most things well):
> >it has been very difficult to correct the bastard form of
> >my name listed on db.d.o that was caused by a misconfigured
> >mailserver years ago. The admin@db address seems like an alias
> >for /dev/null and the DPL directed a complaint back to it.
>
> I think it's far more important for people working on Debian to focus
> their attention on improving our operating system; if "Mark J Ray" is a
> correct variant of your name, no matter how bastardised, I don't think
> it's worth worrying about changing that to "MJ Ray" while there are
> things on the TODO list that effect development directly.
OK. How about mine, then? Short of a limited use legal alias for what geeks
like to call "legacy support", the name listed on my account in db.d.o
is in no fashion correct for me. It was when I first joined; my name has
changed since, for reasons of a personal nature.
This isn't a "bastardized variant", it's flat wrong. Any assertion to the
contrary is personally offensive, by implying that you know what my name is
better than I (or the US legal system) do.
The sheer audacity of telling someone that something most people care about
fairly deeply - the primary identifier most people have for them - is not
of enough importance to warrant either the five minutes (I'm being generous
here) of an admin's time to update a record, or the couple of days to
set up an additional feature in the various DB manipulation methods that
would let a DD adjust it themselves (even in an "add only" fashion if it's
considered cruicial that someone not be able to trivially remove an old
name) seems to me to be, quite simply, staggeringly arrogant.
I'm not asserting this is tbm's fault; it is merely another example of
something that appears to be depressingly endemic among a variety of
"control" points throughout the project: opaque single points of failure
with no obvious paths of recourse or appeal. The issue is known, and I do
hope the candidates will continue to address it.
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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