On Thursday, March 27, 2025 4:07:49 AM Mountain Standard Time Holger Levsen wrote: > On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 11:46:50AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > > I second that. Long emails are not against the code of conduct, > > but impolite ones are. > > https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct reads: > > 1. be respectful - this implies... > 3. be collaborative - this implies... > 4. try to be concise: "Keep in mind that what you write once will be > read by hundreds of persons. Writing a short email means people can > understand the conversation as efficiently as possible. When a long > explanation is necessary, consider adding a summary." > > So I would argue that long emails can very much be against the code > of conduct. When I wrote the above statement, I was actually referring to the listmaster’s Code of Conduct. https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct Specifically: “The mailing lists exist to foster the development and use of Debian. Non-constructive or off-topic messages, along with other abuses, are not welcome.” “Try not to flame; it is not polite.” In fairness, above this list it links to the main Debian Code of Conduct, which you referenced. However, I think it supports the same argument I was making. According to point 4, long emails *can* be against the Code of Conduct, provided they are unnecessarily long. However, It does not say that all long emails are against the Code of Conduct. This can be observed in the text itself. Number 1 doesn’t say, “Try to be resectful”. It says “Be respectful”. Because when it comes to respectful, there is no “try”, there is only “do”. But for number 4, it says “try” and “consider” because sometimes emails just need to be long. Whether an email is necessarily long or unnecessarily long is a fairly subjective assessment. Sometimes important issues simply require a lot of words to cover fairly. Whether an email is respectful is also a fairly subjective assessment, but usually easier to make than if an email is unnecessarily long. In the case of this particular discussion, some of the people who have complained about the length of emails have done so in a way that was not respectful by any definition of the word. So, the point I was making is that those who were being rude while claiming the emails were too long were committing an obvious breach of the Code of Conduct, much worse than any problems caused by the length of the emails they were responding to. To quote the text of point 1. "In a project the size of Debian, inevitably there will be people with whom you may disagree, or find it difficult to cooperate. Accept that, but even so, remain respectful. **Disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour or personal attacks**, and a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community." -- Soren Stoutner soren@debian.org
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