Manoj Srivastava wrote:
It is also very upsetting when technical discussions
immediately escalate into insults, distortion of motivation,
accusations of wanting to hurt Debian, or the users, of being hide
bound in pride and stupidity, having agendas that smack of
discrimination, power grabs, or worse -- all the while actively
casting impediments in actually finding a working solution by
drowning the technical discussion in polemics and ad hominems and
casting to apportion blame before looking at the technical issues.
Add to it argument from extremes, bug severity inflation, and
constant little pin pricks that make it impossible to collaborate, I
would think that some times, it is better to reject contributions if
the net contributions decrease due to the presence of one person.
Agreed. The trouble being that we have no formal processes or hard
metrics for these problems.
Rubbish. Debian has always been far more than a cold, harsh,
faceless corporate entity with no social presence. Technical
excellence does mitigate a lack of social graces, but there are
limits to how much disruption is to be tolerated. Where you have
social interactions, and you have politics, you have subjective
social politics.
I respectfully disagree. In my experience corporations are rarely cold,
harsh and faceless in their internal structure. Rather, they are most
often a continually embattled mass of people fervently trying to
displace one and other in order to increase their standing in the
organization. It is only with rare excellent management and strong
leadership that you see for-profit organizations where technical
excellence comes before personality and influence. I agree that there
are limits and Debian has only recently begun to define those limits.
Sven's case seems to stand in rather sharp contrast to Ted Walther's.
We have, by and large, despite the cat-calls about cabals from
the peanut gallery, managed to make broad decisions rationally. I
don't think we are all in a vast conspiracy to gang up on a fine
contributor without actually looking at the broad picture and the net
results of his presence or absence on a team.
I agree but we must focus on results. I'm afraid of Debian becoming some
painfully polite court where people are forever trying to score points
on one and other by faulting their manners. Keeping things friendly is
critical and etiquette can be a very effective method of intimidating
people. Technical results should be of at least equal import to social
considerations. After all, we're a volunteer OS not a volunteer
international vacation club.
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