Luca Boccassi <bl...@debian.org> writes:
> And I am more than a bit sad that sensible, clear-cut, binding and
> already-implemented decisions taken by our constitutional bodies get
> constantly second-guessed and belittled because of an irrational
> attachment to inconsequential accidents of history. But what can we do,
> we'll just have to be sad together, I guess.
> Aside from that, in the future please avoid using the word 'minorities'
> when talking about silly things such as liking or disliking symlinks, as
> in common English it is used to refer to much more serious matters.
Okay, stop. We are not going to have a Policy conversation like this.
Nothing about this discussion style helps in making a good decision.
Luca, you have asked repeatedly what you can do to advance the status of
your open Policy bugs. Most of the answer to that question is that a lot
of it is outside of your control; I've been having a spectacularly
annoying summer in a bunch of minor ways and, frankly, simply haven't done
much of anything I'm responsible for in Debian. But the most helpful
thing that you could possibly do would be to stop being utterly
emotionally exhausting to deal with.
Case in point: now I'm writing this email message rather than doing any of
the other things that I am quite sure you would rather that I be doing and
that you would consider a much higher priority.
In this bug, about a point that from the Policy perspective is mostly not
even normative, which appears to partly be a bug report against Lintian by
proxy (the Policy Editors do not maintain Lintian), you started at an
emotional level of eight out of ten before anyone even disagreed with you.
Let me quote the start of this bug:
I heard many times the policy maintainers mention something along the
lines of 'policy should not be a hammer to beat other maintainers
with'. Today I saw policy being used to force a maintainer to re-add
support for the deprecated and unsupported split-usr filesystem
layout, as 'policy only mentions /bin/sh, not /usr/bin/sh'.
So let's update the policy to refer to modern and supported filesystem
paths as adopted by Debian de-facto and de-jure, and stop other
maintainers from getting beaten with it.
So right from the first message, you're saying that the goal of this
proposal is to stop other people from doing something socially you don't
like that Policy doesn't even tell them to do. And you're using phrasing
that you know is loaded and contentious and that you know the people
you've been arguing with all over Debian will disagree with.
I have no idea why. Because you like making them mad? Because you're mad
and you want to keep rubbing in their face the fact you disagree with
them? Maybe you think this is your strongest argument? (It is not.)
This is pretty much guaranteed to turn the bug into a fight regardless of
its technical merits, because this presentation essentially says that
you're spoiling for a fight and want someone to attack you.
I cannot remember the last time I have seen someone who is this unwilling
to win an argument. It's driving me nuts. You are winning your technical
arguments in Debian! The technical design that you support is being
implemented because you and others have convinced people that it is a good
idea, even though some people are very upset about this! There are even
people who don't entirely agree with you investing significant amounts of
time and energy to help you realize your technical vision of how Debian
should be assembled.
And yet, every time I see you in a Debian architectural discussion, you're
fighting with everyone in sight as if you're losing. You come across as
the most furious winner of an argument I can remember seeing. This is
directly undermining what you're attempting to achieve, because the sheer
vehemence of the way that you argue every point you care about means that
even people who agree with you don't want to help you get things done
because even being around this level of fighting is deeply exhausting.
A lot of this hasn't been on Policy, although you do have some of the same
tendency to reply to everything you disagree with until people stop
disagreeing even here. But elsewhere, including the Technical Committee
discussion that I assume you were referring to above, it happens a lot. I
can only assume that you think you have to shove harder and harder to get
things to move faster, but this isn't how anything works, particularly in
a volunteer organization. People work on things they enjoy working on.
Calm and productive technical work is enjoyable to a lot of us. Watching
people fight is not enjoyable. What you're actually accomplishing is
building a subconscious emotional association in the brains of people who
are watching and reading between your name and angry arguments. You are
literally training people to avoid you.
You are never going to convince people to stop disagreeing with you.
Never. We have a process for making decisions because sometimes consensus
is not achievable, and the people who don't agree with those decisions
may, in fact, *never* agree with those decisions. They get to do that.
It's not a crime. It's also not a personal offense against you.
When people voice that disagreement, again, to a decision-making body and
the immediate response is for multiple members of that body to politely
but quite clearly indicate that, although they're willing to listen, the
discussion is probably going nowhere and no decisions will change, this is
what winning an argument looks like. This is what you're going to get.
You're not going to get unanimous consensus. Take the win and *leave it
alone*.
Right now, you keep risking undermining architectural decisions that
you've worked hard to achieve because you pile into discussions with your
intensity knob already maxed and say a whole lot of confrontational stuff,
some of which is careless or imprecise, and then the people *who already
agree with you* feel obligated to disagree and clarify. And *then you
start fighting them*, and absolutely nothing about this is achieving any
goal that you have.
Please, for the sake of my blood pressure, I beg of you, dial it *way
down*. I swear that when I do process Policy bugs I will read all the
messages and understand the technical arguments and clearly state what I
think the most convincing points are, and everyone will get a chance to
review that, and changes can even be reverted later if we get it wrong.
Nothing is going to happen by surprise, and you do not have to be the last
arguer standing in order to get your change into Policy. The more
messages there are, and the more emotional heat there is, the more energy
the whole process requires and the longer it takes.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
