William L. Thomson Jr. wrote: > No one questions why I stepped down. I have wondered what happened, but haven't felt able to investigate.
Please know that I wouldn't take sides without investigating, and I think that an overwhelming majority is also like that. A problem is that you'll only ever hear from those who do take sides, but I think the vast majority doesn't. In the end I think giving up any position comes down to one of two things: either feeling that one can not sufficiently meet expectations, or feeling that others do not meet one's own expectations. I've experienced both. How those happen is probably always a sad story of personal differences. :\ > I let others convince me I was the problem so I went away. Yet things > did not improve in my absence. Maybe I wasn't the problem.... I hope that everyone always learns. I think almost everyone does. William L. Thomson Jr. wrote: > > doing whatever you did to get banned from GitHub > > You tell me does this make any sense to ban someone from Gentoo's Github? > https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/1721#issuecomment-300178677 It doesn't make sense to me, because you're trying to help inform a community contributor. But I also don't know any of the "Gentoo Java" context - which I think also matters. Reading the motivation for the ban "not the place to post comments and recount how Gentoo Java is struggling with its staffing needs" and "GitHub .. [is] for code-centric feedback and technical discussions, not about Gentoo-meta issues or the like" I can understand that someone would feel that your comment was out of place, but I don't think that a 14 day ban is an appropriate first response. That said, expectations were clearly not met, all around. The expectations of the community contributor were not met by Gentoo, since (as is mentioned in the ban mail) Gentoo is not a typical GitHub project, where a PR is the entire process into the repo. I think it is perfectly fine to communicate about this in a PR, and I think a Gentoo policy never to do so is a mistake. The expectations of the Gentoo GitHub Project were not met by you, since it seems a PR policy is "Everyone can review pull requests. However, please make sure that your comments are correct and on topic." and your comment was also trying to inform about the larger context, not strictly limited to technical details. I personally disagree with such expectations in the GitHub team, but I can't even be bothered to become a proper Gentoo developer, because the threshold is just too high for me. I would attribute the contributor's (very valid) disappointment to lack of communication, ie. to Gentoo not having set accurate expectations. It is probably true that Gentoo isn't equipped to do so at the moment, so everyone has to learn on their own. Some will get burnt in the process. :\ > https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/6033 > I felt I should have responded to not be rude. I agree with you, and you seem to always respond politely. While I sometimes find it a bit difficult to understand what you intend to say because of your writing style, it looks to me like you always intend to equip others with useful information. > I still do not respond in kind to others. I think that shows good character. Please keep that up, no matter what others do. To the actual topic of Gentoo Java I think the best you can do is essentially what you are already doing - work on solving your own problems in your own overlay, if there is a kind of informal team working mostly to provide life support. You can try to support them, but you may have very different needs, and if communication doesn't work so well then there can't be an actual team. I rarely use Java, but what I do know about Java supports your argument that Gentoo could need a lot of work for JDK 9, because the expectations/assumptions of the Java ecosystem are quite far apart from those of the Gentoo ecosystem, and if a great solution is even achievable at all then it certainly requires mastering both Java and Gentoo, which likely requires Java people to get into Gentoo rather than the other way around, and both environments have long learning curves, and until there is a critical mass of developers mastering both, there can't really be a team. :\ Kind regards //Peter
