Re: A question to the Debian community ...
Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 02:07:36PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> If you're out to improve the world and get it rid of all social
>> unfairnesses, I suggest you find yourself another project.
> Now there's a shitty thing to say.
Anything else would be simply inaccurate.
What do you expect? Do you tell people that breaking up with their
partners is a shitty thing to do? Lots of breakups are unfair. They
happen anyway. Some of them come complete with the horrified and offended
ex who can't understand why the relationship fell apart and who can't
believe how horribly unfair the breakup was, and keeps hanging around,
convinced that one day you'll realize just how badly you treated them and
then everything will be wonderful again. Often they're wonderfully decent
human beings -- after all, that's why the relationship started in the
first place. Those are sometimes the ones that make you feel like crap.
You still don't get back together, and if you do, it's inevitably a
horrible mistake.
It was a failure of social interaction. Last time I checked, we're still
humans, with all the associated baggage and standard problems. If you
have some solution to falling outs between friendships, communities, and
relationships that allows them all to be resolved fairly, you should quit
your job and start writing self-help books, because you'd be richer than
Bill Gates.
Debian is not a social experiment in conflict-free problem resolution.
It's a project for creating a free operating system. Tackle one hard
problem at a time. In the meantime, use the best techniques you can in
other problem areas, realize that it's not an area of expertise and
occasionally it's going to be more broken than it needs to be, and don't
spend the rest of time revisiting decisions over and over. At some point,
you have to say enough is enough, walk away from the mess, and move on.
Poking at it forever doesn't make it better.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: