Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Tollef Fog Heen schreef op 24-09-2016 18:12:

]] Bart Schouten

Your client seems to word-wrap poorly.


Russ Allbery schreef op 24-09-2016 2:48:

> I guess I'm finding it quite remarkable how much concerted effort
> seems to be going into try to make me feel ashamed of my behavior in
> some way, which is how I read "feel like excuses."

Not ashamed, just bad ;-).


So you're flat-out saying that you're intentionally behaving like a
dick.

Go away and don't come back until your behaviour's changed.  People
trolling and behaving like dicks are not welcome in Debian.


So you are basing your conclusion based merely on my words.

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Adam D. Barratt]

On Sat, 2016-09-24 at 16:06 +0200, Bart Schouten wrote:
> Russ Allbery schreef op 24-09-2016 2:48:
> > The Wanderer  writes:
[...]
> >> Some excuses are valid, mind. That doesn't mean they aren't excuses.
> > 
> > I guess I'm finding it quite remarkable how much concerted effort seems 
> > to
> > be going into try to make me feel ashamed of my behavior in some way,
> > which is how I read "feel like excuses."
> 
> Not ashamed, just bad ;-).

Please, just stop.

Anything useful that you may have been attempting to contribute to this
discussion has long since been overshadowed by the length of your
responses (which mostly seem to be continually saying "no, you're wrong,
listen to me" in multiple different phrasings) and trying to browbeat
respected members of the community because they hold different opinions
to you.

Regards,

Adam

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Bart Schouten

Your client seems to word-wrap poorly.

> Russ Allbery schreef op 24-09-2016 2:48:
>
> > I guess I'm finding it quite remarkable how much concerted effort
> > seems to be going into try to make me feel ashamed of my behavior in
> > some way, which is how I read "feel like excuses."
> 
> Not ashamed, just bad ;-).

So you're flat-out saying that you're intentionally behaving like a
dick.

Go away and don't come back until your behaviour's changed.  People
trolling and behaving like dicks are not welcome in Debian.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Russ Allbery schreef op 24-09-2016 2:48:

The Wanderer  writes:


While I see the perspective which leads you to that statement, I don't
think that's strictly correct.


The way I usually put it is that "if you expect to be excused because 
of

it, it's an excuse".



Some excuses are valid, mind. That doesn't mean they aren't excuses.


I guess I'm finding it quite remarkable how much concerted effort seems 
to

be going into try to make me feel ashamed of my behavior in some way,
which is how I read "feel like excuses."


Not ashamed, just bad ;-).

And it's not about you if you are the one leading the way forward ;-).

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Russ Allbery schreef op 24-09-2016 1:12:

Bart Schouten  writes:

I think the point that people are trying to get across is that a lot 
of

what you say Russ feels like excuses.


An excuse is when you know you should do something but aren't going to 
do

so, and are trying to justify that decision to oneself.  That's not the
disagreement here; rather, we have a very fundamental disagreement over
what people should do.


I rather doubt we have that a fundamental disagreement.

Sorry to say it in this way (that is not my clear intent here ;-)) but 
often times I just think that when someone says "I disagree" I wonder if 
they've actually understood what I've said, but since they sometimes do 
not summarize what they think I've written (or said) I have this 
peculiar notion in my mind that they're talking of a different thing 
than I was ;-).


I hope that is fair enough here.


You believe that I should be doing certain things in bug management, 
and I
don't agree with you.  It's not an excuse for me to tell you that I'm 
not
going to do the thing you want me to do because I think you're wrong.  
:)


Maybe you don't even understand what I think you should be doing ;-). 
Maybe my explanation was just not very well done and now you're 
defending against accusations that were never made ;-). Or against 
"desires" that were never really expressed.



It's a way for me to say "I don't agree with you and you haven't 
convinced

me."


When I mean "excuses" I mean the kind of things that sound like "I 
haven't taken the trash out because the sun was too hot." Maybe for a 
person (for one person) the sun being hot is a good reason (excuse) not 
to do something, for another it just sounds like an excuse, you know.


Sometimes "There is a lot of literature on this subject and experts 
agree that ..." sounds like an excuse because those experts aren't here, 
those arguments aren't made, and it's an external authority that has no 
place in a discussion or debate; hence it will always feel like an 
excuse because it is not a real argument to make.


To give perhaps a weird example: non-food-grade vinegar is perfectly 
edible. If you mix "cleaning vinegar" with say tropical fruit juice (the 
thick kind) you get a kind of drink that feels really strengthening and 
anyone with half a mind would know that if this stuff is only harmful in 
high concentrations, dilluting it to the point of not having much 
"vinegar acid" anymore will make it well just vinegar.


They call it "non-food-grade" based purely on the concentration of the 
acid, so if you dilute it, it becomes food-grade. But people will then 
cite the "experts" that say that you can't drink it. You gotta keep 
thinking for yourself, you know.


So when you cite "experts" I don't know what drug those experts were 
abusing while not creating a functional system, to put it a little 
'aggressively' like that ;-). As you say below, and as you attest to 
below, having a second way to classify a thing can never change the 
fundamental functioning of a system. It is theoretically impossible that 
adding a second "closed" state with more meaning would create a 
non-functioning system when before it was functioning. That's not 
possible.


So if I then hear talk about "experts" analyzing systems, I wonder what 
kind of systems those were and if they actually agreed with what I just 
proposed, and I think not, actually.





It's not that I'm not hearing you; it's just that I don't agree.


Well and sorry to repeat it, but I also wonder what you mean by my 
statements if you do not summarize them and only characterize them.


It feels more like talking past each other than anything else.


If we had some other state in our bug system other than closed that 
also
gets the bug off my view and makes it disappear from the various 
tracking

statistics on, say, the Debian package tracker that I'm trying to keep
clean, I would probably use it because I'm kind of obsessive about
classifying things.


Hey, don't blame yourself, it's a good thing, to a certain point ;-).

Sure, if you can turn that "open" bug into a "shelved" bug and make it 
disappear from "open bugs" lists then that seems like a perfect outcome, 
right.


It means a little more differentiation just turned it into a better 
system, right.


This is why a fundamental disagreement with the "closed" state for these 
kind of bugs is important because it can improve the system, and ... 
perhaps you've already agreed in a way without saying so (or while 
criticising your self ;-)) (for it) that an extra state would be handy:


- it does not appear on open bugs
- it does not appear on closed bugs
- it does not give the person the impression that his/her bug is getting 
totally ignored
- it does give the impression "Okay, my bug is getting recognised, it is 
not getting wiped, I have been heard".


The /only/ thing people have an issue with is not getting heard.










Using a lot of white space 

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Holger Levsen]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 05:48:13PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I guess I'm finding it quite remarkable how much concerted effort seems to
> be going into try to make me feel ashamed of my behavior in some way,

OTOH I for one, am very happy to see "the old Russ is back", the one
writing remarkable well written thoughful, insightful, respectful, clear
mails, like very few people on our lists can and do.

Thanks a lot for your mails in this thread, Russ. They saved me from
writing some (less good ones).


-- 
cheers,
Holger


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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Ian Jackson]

Bart Schouten writes ("Re: Debian does not have customers"):
> You know probably just as well as I do that often times when you mention 
> the slightest of difficulties with any software package to anyone on any 
> Linux mailing list or forum, the first thing they often tell you is 
> "Have you filed a bug?" or when they are feeling particularly insincere, 
> they will ask "what is the bug number of the bug you have filed?" all 
> the while knowing you haven't yet filed anything, you were mentioning it 
> "here" first.

I have to confess I'm guilty of this.  But I really try very hard to
do it only when I think that such a bug report would do good of some
kind.

I'm firmly with Russ, I'm afraid.  And with the GNU guideline for
maintainers, whose position is that the purpose of bug reports, from
the pov of the maintainer, is to improve the software.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

The Wanderer  writes:

> While I see the perspective which leads you to that statement, I don't
> think that's strictly correct.

> The way I usually put it is that "if you expect to be excused because of
> it, it's an excuse".

> Some excuses are valid, mind. That doesn't mean they aren't excuses.

I guess I'm finding it quite remarkable how much concerted effort seems to
be going into try to make me feel ashamed of my behavior in some way,
which is how I read "feel like excuses."  Regardless of what sort of
definitional argument you're trying to make here, that's not a term that
you use when you're trying to convey the message "I see where you're
coming from and why your position seems justified to you."  It's a phrase
that you use to express that you think other people's arguments are
illegitimate, and usually to try to shame people into agreeing with you.

Maybe this is less obvious because I'm trying to engage with the
underlying thought process here, but this thread has been rather
aggressively antagonistic and has attributed all sorts of awful behavior
to others.  I'm not sure what people expect to see as a result when that's
the tone of the discussion?

I think people are trying to express a lot of frustration, so I'm trying
to be sympathetic, but that doesn't mean I think this type of criticism is
warranted, constructive, or a reasonable way to treat other people.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Debian does not have customers

[The Wanderer]

On 2016-09-23 at 19:12, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Bart Schouten  writes:
> 
>> I think the point that people are trying to get across is that a
>> lot of what you say Russ feels like excuses.
> 
> An excuse is when you know you should do something but aren't going
> to do so, and are trying to justify that decision to oneself.

While I see the perspective which leads you to that statement, I don't
think that's strictly correct.

The way I usually put it is that "if you expect to be excused because of
it, it's an excuse".

Some excuses are valid, mind. That doesn't mean they aren't excuses.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

Bart Schouten  writes:

> I think the point that people are trying to get across is that a lot of
> what you say Russ feels like excuses.

An excuse is when you know you should do something but aren't going to do
so, and are trying to justify that decision to oneself.  That's not the
disagreement here; rather, we have a very fundamental disagreement over
what people should do.

You believe that I should be doing certain things in bug management, and I
don't agree with you.  It's not an excuse for me to tell you that I'm not
going to do the thing you want me to do because I think you're wrong.  :)
It's a way for me to say "I don't agree with you and you haven't convinced
me."

I'm not really sure how much point there is in continuing to discuss this,
since I don't think either of us are particularly likely to change each
other's minds.  I hear what you're saying about what you believe people's
perceptions are.  I don't agree that this is how our bug system is
designed, that those perceptions are a particularly serious problem in
Debian, or that any change is really needed here.  It's not that I'm not
hearing you; it's just that I don't agree.

If we had some other state in our bug system other than closed that also
gets the bug off my view and makes it disappear from the various tracking
statistics on, say, the Debian package tracker that I'm trying to keep
clean, I would probably use it because I'm kind of obsessive about
classifying things.  If you give me a classification system, I'll probably
try to use all of it, even if that's not a particularly good use of my
time.  :)  So in that sense I'm agnostic about whether we want to spell
"this bug is highly unlikely to get fixed" as "closed" or as "on-hold" or
as something else.  If someone changed the BTS, I'd shrug and change what
I do.  But I don't feel like this is necessary or particularly important.

What is important to me are two points: one, that we (as much as possible;
this is hard, for all the reasons pointed out in this thread) tell people
if their bugs are unlikely to ever be looked at if this is the case rather
than just silently ignoring them, and two, that we be very clear that the
existence of a bug (particularly a non-RC bug) does not create an
obligation for the maintainer to fix it.

We all want to fix bugs, but we do that as part of a volunteer project;
people aren't always going to have time, energy, or desire, and that has
to be okay, or we will lose the volunteer efforts of people who would be
able to contribute occasional work but who don't want to incur the
obligations of letting Debian maintainer work turn into a second job.
(And yes, that means that we should be much more open to NMUs and change
our historical baggage around that.  Please NMU my packages if there are
bugs I'm not getting to!  Although ideally talk to me first, since there
may be design reasons why I didn't fix the bug, not just an issue of
insufficient time.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Ben Finney schreef op 22-09-2016 2:27:

Xen  writes:


I would simply suggest that in principle you keep bugs open until it
no longer exists.


One reason bug reports get closed is because the report is far too 
vague

to even know *whether* it exists, or under what conditions it would be
considered fixed.

That action is IMO much better than leaving a vague report open that
cannot even in principle be said to be resolved.


I think that is a different category than bugs you cannot solve or don't 
have enough information to deal with. If a report provides so little 
information that working with it would require disproportional amounts 
of time, sure, close it.


But I thought we were more talking about the kind of issue that says "We 
can be pretty sure it exists, and we are happy to know about it, there 
is just no one right now that can work on it". (Sorry).


Also as said I didn't just mean "keep open" but I meant more like, 
"shelve the bug, keep it around, but just don't work on it (until 
someone feels like it, or you have collected more information due to 
other bug reports etc).




Some customer support systems have the ability to create notes for user 
accounts. If some user is in violation, or if people complain about some 
other user, support staff may just keep notes for that offending user, 
because they cannot act until they have received more complaints about 
the same user.


So these complaints are not treated individually. They are kept "open" 
in a way.


You can just shelve a bug because not enough information is available to 
deal with it now.


These customer support people will tell you "we cannot act on it now, 
but we have made a notition on it" -- and there is nothing vague or 
ambiguous about that.


It is respectful in that sense; you get feedback, as to the true state 
of the "bug" report.


So you could have a shelved state that said "Not enough information to 
act on it presently".


Or "Too little information to process further at this time."

You could call that a "closed" state but it communicates a whole lot me 
(and better) than just "closed".

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Russ Allbery schreef op 21-09-2016 19:56:

Xen  writes:

I would simply suggest that in principle you keep bugs open until it 
no
longer exists. But that you introduce a different open state other 
than

closed that will communicate "has been looked at, is not capable of
being solved right now". This could be "pending" or "held" or
"kept". Because "closed" indeed communicates "not-a-bug" or
"works-for-me" or "invalid" or "fixed" and not "frozen".


I recommend reviewing the literature around how to manage development
backlogs.  There is quite a bit of thought in this area, and this 
approach

is widely considered at best useless (the holding area just becomes
another way of spelling "closed" because it accumulates so much stuff 
that

it becomes unsearchable and no one looks at it) and at worst actively
harmful.

I get that no one wants to hear "no one is going to look at this bug in
any reasonable time frame."  It's not a pleasant thing to hear.  But 
it's

vastly superior to just not hearing anything.  You're making a mistake
that lots of people make with bug tracking systems: in a desire to be
non-confrontational and to never deliver bad news or provoke hard
conversations about prioritization, you're erring on the side of not
communicating at all or communicating in weak and ambiguous ways.  This
can create unrealistic expectations on the part of the bug submitter,
which are later dashed.  This is just bad all around, and it leads to a
lack of trust in the long run.

If no one is ever going to look at the bug again, just close it.  It 
feels

more confrontational, but it's far more honest, and it doesn't create
unrealistic expectations.  (Obviously, try to do this politely and
constructively!)


I agree with Adrian that honesty comes in more forms than this.

You know probably just as well as I do that often times when you mention 
the slightest of difficulties with any software package to anyone on any 
Linux mailing list or forum, the first thing they often tell you is 
"Have you filed a bug?" or when they are feeling particularly insincere, 
they will ask "what is the bug number of the bug you have filed?" all 
the while knowing you haven't yet filed anything, you were mentioning it 
"here" first.


Then, when you proceed down that path, you find that it is often very 
hard to get any one to look at the bug or to not close it instantly 
because it does not agree with the position of the sun in the sky that 
very day.


Now Granted, if Debian is a distribution maintaining packages of 
software that comes from some upstream place, it is going to be very 
hard for Debian maintainers to be responsible for the bugs or errors in 
those packages, because... they are not.


Particularly in the case of something like Gnome anything that's wrong 
with it needs to be handled upstream, there is no other way.


But telling people to file bugs constantly on the one hand and then 
opening some waste bucket on the other hand where you "deal" with them 
is no fair way of doing business in that sense, and certainly not 
blaming or accusing Debian as the only culprit here, if at all. 
Personally, as I've said, I find that "bugzilla" bug systems are very 
user-hostile and something like Jira is already much much much much 
nicer.


for the simple reason that a Jira issue tracking system is also a 
creative outlet for suggestions and ideas, and not just complaints.




I think the point that people are trying to get across is that a lot of 
what you say Russ feels like excuses.


You say "there has been a lot of thinking in the field" but that's just 
an excuse.


If "closing" has any meaning then it must be some definitive state. If 
some bug is nothing but petty complaining, fine.


If a bug report is too vague to consider, fine. You can state that as a 
reason.


But normally, just saying, that unless "upstream" never even takes note 
of the "downstream" bugs and hence bugs become "out of date" or 
"outdated" due to changes, or something of the kind


Anything that exists today is going to exist tomorrow unless it is 
changed. Fixed. Reverted. Averted. Developed. Anything.


"Closed" means closed. It means the bug has been handled (or the report 
has).


What if someone else comes across the same issue? Is the semantically 
correct thing to do now to reopen it? And then what? For it to be closed 
instantly again?


If you can say "the bug has been acknowledged but we can't really do 
anything with it right now" I think that is "confrontational" enough and 
actually semantically correct.


"Closed" doesn't make you want to look at the bug. Not even if you are a 
developer interested in it.



If you say "on hold" or "held" or "frozen" or "acknowlegded but shelved" 
(acknowledged but "sleeping") creates too much of a backlog then that is 
a practical issue that doesn't warrant lying about the actual state of 
the bug.


Just an analogy:

If you have a dam in a lake and the dam needs to let 

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Ben Finney]

Xen  writes:

> I would simply suggest that in principle you keep bugs open until it
> no longer exists.

One reason bug reports get closed is because the report is far too vague
to even know *whether* it exists, or under what conditions it would be
considered fixed.

That action is IMO much better than leaving a vague report open that
cannot even in principle be said to be resolved.

-- 
 \   “Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?” “Uh... yeah, |
  `\ Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?” |
_o__)   —_Pinky and The Brain_ |
Ben Finney

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Ian Jackson]

Adrian Bunk writes ("Re: Debian does not have customers"):
> If you want to be honest, you have to tell users that they shouldn't 
> waste their time on reporting bugs against the ancient versions of
> such packages in stable.
> It is not likely that anyone will ever look at these bugs - they are
> clutter from the moment they are being reported.

There are probably _some_ bugs it's worth reporting in stable against
GNOME packages.  But I agree, and it would be nice to have a good way
for package maintainers to communicate this kind of information to
users.

It needs to be a decision for the package maintainer, since they know
what kinds of bugs are useful.

Personally I like the fact that for most of the software I use, the
churn rate is low enough and the quality high enough that reporting
even minor bugs in stable is useful because the bugs are usually also
in sid, and could be fixed there based on my report.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.

closing bugs is not hiding problems (Re: Debian does not have customers)

[Holger Levsen]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 03:13:32PM +0200, Xen wrote:
> >A closed bug is presumptively a fixed bug (because bugs which have been
> >fixed get closed).
> >
> >An open bug is presumptively a non-fixed bug.
> >
> >Therefore, to close a bug which has not been fixed is to pretend that
> >the problem reported in that bug has been fixed, i.e., does not
> >currently exist.
> >
> >Therefore, to close a bug which has not been fixed is to attempt to hide
> >the problem reported in that bug, by making it appear as though that bug
> >has been fixed.
> This is just very well put.

no, its not. it follows some logic, yes, and that's all. just that the
logic is roughly like:

a. a candle creates light.
b. the sun creates light.
c. so they are roughly the same.

really.


-- 
cheers,
Holger


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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Adrian Bunk]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 12:50:41PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>...
> But still, despite all of those caveats, I do think there are a few things
> that are fairly clear-cut.  If the package has 3,000 open bugs, just close
> out the unactionable reports in some polite and constructive way.  At that
> point, there are so many actionable bugs ahead in the queue that those
> reports are adding clutter and making it harder for people to get a handle
> on the bugs that can be directly addressed by the package maintainers.
>...

How do you define "unactionable reports" and "constructive way"?

A submitter who reported an occasional segfault in wheezy GNOME
3 years ago might answer that he still sees it in jessie today.

What action to you expect from the package maintainers to directly 
address this bug after that answer?

The real problem is not the clutter among old bugs - when noone
is able, available and willing to fix them it makes exactly zero 
difference whether there are 30 or 3000 open bugs.

The real problem is that with current resources it is not even 
possible to handle all new bugs in some packages.

But what you describe is based on the (often unrealistic) assumption 
that the package maintainers are able to handle all new bugs and are 
additionallt even able to handle some of the old bugs.

If you want to be honest, you have to tell users that they shouldn't 
waste their time on reporting bugs against the ancient versions of
such packages in stable.
It is not likely that anyone will ever look at these bugs - they are
clutter from the moment they are being reported.

cu
Adrian

-- 

   "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
   "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
   Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

Adrian Bunk  writes:

> "no one is ever going to look at the bug again" is actually impossible
> to prove for a project like Debian - some new Debian developer or even
> some new upstream developer might actually look at it tomorrow or in a
> few years.

Yeah, I know, and this is a valid point, and is the reason why we all keep
some bugs around.  And there's some merit to doing that.  But I think we
generally keep too many bugs around.

We've had this conversation a few times before on debian-devel, without
reaching much in the way of an actionable conclusion.  But it's very hard
to do bug triage for popular, large software packages (the kernel, the X
stack, GNOME, that sort of thing).  Even if you filter out unactionable
bugs, there are so many bugs that look reasonable in isolation, but the
math indicates that most of them will simply never be addressed.

The other angle on this that people underestimate is that most bug reports
have a useful lifetime.  I've certainly done my share of resolving really
old bug reports, and it's quite satisfying when it happens.  But it's also
very common to look at old bugs and realize that the world has changed and
the software has changed to the point where the bug report doesn't really
apply.  Or, even harder to detect, the original bug reporter doesn't have
the same problem any more or isn't even using the software, and no one
else has cared (which is impossible to measure, sadly).  Or the problem
has subsequently been reported in some fresher bug that people are
actively working on.

This is why, in a work environment, it's usually someone's job (and has
often been my job) to do backlog grooming, close out bugs that have become
irrelevant, close out bugs whose priority is so low that no one should be
working on them, and try to keep the backlog actionable.

Now, the sort of aggressive grooming you do in a job isn't appropriate for
a volunteer activity without some changes.  For one, there's no agreed-on
priority across all contributors; one person's low-priority bug may be
someone else's starter project.  So it's much less useful to close out
bugs purely on a priority basis.  And, as you say, there's no way to know
for certain that you won't get a sudden influx of volunteer activity
(although I think we have to be realistic about how likely that is).

But still, despite all of those caveats, I do think there are a few things
that are fairly clear-cut.  If the package has 3,000 open bugs, just close
out the unactionable reports in some polite and constructive way.  At that
point, there are so many actionable bugs ahead in the queue that those
reports are adding clutter and making it harder for people to get a handle
on the bugs that can be directly addressed by the package maintainers.

> So allowing users to report bugs against stable does often already
> create unrealistic expectations like "someone will look at the bug" or
> even "the bug will be fixed in stable".

Yeah, bug reports against stable are another very tricky area in Debian.
There are packages where they will be addressed; for example, I have a lot
of packages with <10 (and often 0) bug reports, and I will look at and try
to resolve bugs against stable on those packages.  But for something like
GNOME, it's unrealistic to expect much resolution of bugs only in stable
unless they're particularly severe.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Adrian Bunk]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 10:56:10AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>...
> If no one is ever going to look at the bug again, just close it.  It feels
> more confrontational, but it's far more honest, and it doesn't create
> unrealistic expectations.
>...

"no one is ever going to look at the bug again" is actually impossible 
to prove for a project like Debian - some new Debian developer or even 
some new upstream developer might actually look at it tomorrow or in a 
few years.

And if you want to be honest, you have to start by telling people
that it might well be s/again/at all/ - even in many actively
maintained packages.

An example:

Even though Debian is a pretty marginal distribution on the desktop 
market, the Debian GNOME maintainers are sitting on 3800 open bugs.

For a normal bug reported against the old version of GNOME in unstable, 
chances are noone will ever look at it and the efforts of the reporter 
for creating the bug (which might have been hours) are wasted.

Note that this is not meant against the Debian GNOME maintainers.

It might be a lot of non-fun work to debug an issue, especially
if it is something like a random segfault.

The time people are able and willing to spend on Debian is limited,
and noone can be forced to work on anything.

There would not even be any realistic way to deliver a fix - updates to 
stable are handled very restrictively in Debian, and the second-best 
option of using backports is in practive impossible for software like 
GNOME where updating one package does (due to upstream dependencies) 
often require updating two dozen other packages as well.

So allowing users to report bugs against stable does often already
create unrealistic expectations like "someone will look at the bug"
or even "the bug will be fixed in stable".

Policies for updating stable can be changed, but I do not see where to 
suddenly find the huge amount of people with the skills, spare time and 
enthusiasm to properly debug all issues reported against the ancient 
software [1] the users of Debian stable are using.

cu
Adrian

[1] all software in stable is currently at least 2 years old,
for GNOME that is 4 major releases

-- 

   "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
   "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
   Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

Xen  writes:

> I would simply suggest that in principle you keep bugs open until it no
> longer exists. But that you introduce a different open state other than
> closed that will communicate "has been looked at, is not capable of
> being solved right now". This could be "pending" or "held" or
> "kept". Because "closed" indeed communicates "not-a-bug" or
> "works-for-me" or "invalid" or "fixed" and not "frozen".

I recommend reviewing the literature around how to manage development
backlogs.  There is quite a bit of thought in this area, and this approach
is widely considered at best useless (the holding area just becomes
another way of spelling "closed" because it accumulates so much stuff that
it becomes unsearchable and no one looks at it) and at worst actively
harmful.

I get that no one wants to hear "no one is going to look at this bug in
any reasonable time frame."  It's not a pleasant thing to hear.  But it's
vastly superior to just not hearing anything.  You're making a mistake
that lots of people make with bug tracking systems: in a desire to be
non-confrontational and to never deliver bad news or provoke hard
conversations about prioritization, you're erring on the side of not
communicating at all or communicating in weak and ambiguous ways.  This
can create unrealistic expectations on the part of the bug submitter,
which are later dashed.  This is just bad all around, and it leads to a
lack of trust in the long run.

If no one is ever going to look at the bug again, just close it.  It feels
more confrontational, but it's far more honest, and it doesn't create
unrealistic expectations.  (Obviously, try to do this politely and
constructively!)

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Xen]

The Wanderer schreef op 21-09-2016 4:58:


A closed bug is presumptively a fixed bug (because bugs which have been
fixed get closed).

An open bug is presumptively a non-fixed bug.

Therefore, to close a bug which has not been fixed is to pretend that
the problem reported in that bug has been fixed, i.e., does not
currently exist.

Therefore, to close a bug which has not been fixed is to attempt to 
hide
the problem reported in that bug, by making it appear as though that 
bug

has been fixed.


This is just very well put.



Russ has provided a rationale for why leaving insufficient-data bugs
open is not a good idea for many kinds of projects, and I believe for
why Debian would be one of them; I'm not sure I necessarily accept that
rationale, but it is a solid one. That doesn't invalidate the above
logic, however, only explain why it may not be able to prevail in the
circumstances which we have to live under.


In reponse to Russ also,


Metaphorically speaking, or sematically speaking, if you close something 
you terminate discussion about it. If you "close a chapter of a book" 
then it is past, it is water under the bridge. To properly redirect the 
bug to some other place, there would have to be a closed state that 
would prolongate its existence in another way, namely to direct it to a 
different structure or different entity that could take better care of 
the bug or issue.


"wontfix" and "works-for-me" are by themselves rather hostile.

Bugzilla itself (regular Bugzilla, that also uses these things) is in 
itself a rather hostile thing e.g. compared to Jira.


I just want to relay that I think the Wanderer is right in his or her 
characterisation and assessment of what a "closed bug" does to someone.


I venture on paths where bugs are closed by lazy people that just don't 
want to work on the bug ;-) and some of those people work for Red Hat. 
It is simply often used as a moral instrument instead of a technical 
one.


I would simply suggest that in principle you keep bugs open until it no 
longer exists. But that you introduce a different open state other than 
closed that will communicate "has been looked at, is not capable of 
being solved right now". This could be "pending" or "held" or "kept". 
Because "closed" indeed communicates "not-a-bug" or "works-for-me" or 
"invalid" or "fixed" and not "frozen".

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Russ Allbery schreef op 20-09-2016 1:15:

Bart Schouten  writes:


I am just going to respond point by point. I was not merely talking
about open source here.


But I was.  :)  I'm not particularly interested in talking about 
anything
else, since that's the point of this discussion: Debian as a free 
software

project, and what that means for our relationship with our users.


I realize that but I've just come to understand recently, and over time, 
that there are great similarities that are often not recognised.


The open source world uses different jargon for the same things, in my 
perspective.




I do greatly appreciate your in-depth explanation of where you're 
coming

from.  The ideas of mutuality that you talk about resonate with me as
well, and I'm not after some sort of one-sided relationship.  But I 
think
we're talking past each other a bit in that this is exactly the point: 
the

customer model is one-sided, except for the money flow.


Thank you. But I would hold that the outlook on life doesn't change when 
money is involved.


For instance: personally as I am using so much "free software" in the 
event that if I ever did make a successful business out of it (just 
saying it in a certain way here) (without trying to incur debt now) I 
might feel inclined to think "I have been given all of that, in a sense 
for free, but I never considered it had to be for free. Now that it is 
making me money, I am going to give back to it."


A bit the style the graduates in the USA have. Many successful alumni 
contribute back to schools and universities, also financially.


See I like for the relationship to be or remain open and not determined 
by laws or regulations, so I am free to do /in/ it what I want.


But this mindset "I wouldn't mind giving back (paying for it) 
financially in due time" also has a consequence that you may not like 
;-) (just kidding you here).





You were specifically talking about the free software relationship with
users who do not have the technical capabilities to contribute to the
development of the software, so that's what I'm focusing on.  In that
situation, I think the gift characterization is accurate.  If people 
are
actively collaborating together on a project, each contributing pieces 
of
it, this becomes a somewhat different scenario of a mutual project 
where

everyone is adding their piece to build something together.  But that
inherently involves collaboration, which isn't the context of this 
thread.


But that user may turn into a collaborator.

And when is the contribution recognised? Some people contribute (for the 
time) by sharing ideas.


Others contribute by developing concepts, or experimenting with systems. 
Others contribute by writing software (maybe not exclusively for Debian) 
or maintaining packages (maybe exclusively for Debian).


So just assuming this is a gliding scale here, or a matter of "how much" 
rather than "if at all" (relative and not absolute) -- a matter of 
gradation, not absolutes,


then it would be reasonable to say that "solve it yourself" but be a 
rather hostile thing to say to a fellow contributor, wouldn't it? If you 
said that to your teammates, it wouldn't be very nice.





(In a sense, we're all collaboratively building human society together,
but I think that sense is too abstract to help much when trying to 
decide
specifically how the Debian Project should deal with incoming bug 
reports,

although it's worth keeping in mind when deciding when and how to
volunteer one's time.)


I like and I am happy that you say this here, at least, perhaps.



I most assuredly don't know anything of the kind!  In fact, I 
completely

disagree with that statement!

No one is required to contribute to my open source projects in order to
use them.  In fact, if I required such a thing, it would not be open
source; it's explicitly ruled out by the definition.

Maybe you're talking about copyleft licenses specifically?  Those 
require

that *if* you make modifications *and* you distribute them to other
people, *then* you have to provide source.  But that absolutely doesn't
require you to contribute in kind!  You can use the software and modify 
it

all you want for your personal use without any sort of in-kind
contribution.

(That said, I'm one of those free software developers who prefers not 
to

use copyleft because I don't like the sorts of relationships that are
created by long legal documents, although I do respect what advocates 
of

copyleft are trying to accomplish.)


Well same here, we have a like-minded person then ;-). What often 
happens in open source (not necessarily here) is that contributions of 
/thinking/ or /designing/ or /reflecting/ are dissuaded unless and until 
someone "makes his hands dirty". Debate, then, is discouraged until 
someone is an active contributor by doing the "dirty work" (the way in 
Spain some construction worker will have to do the more unpleasant jobs 
until he becomes 

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

The Wanderer  writes:

> A closed bug is presumptively a fixed bug (because bugs which have been
> fixed get closed).

I think this is only an assumption that would be made by someone who
wasn't familiar with bug tracking systems?  There are usually a whole
bunch of different reasons to close a bug other than because it was
fixed.

The Debian BTS doesn't have close states, so we just don't track that
information and this assumption is even more wrong for the Debian BTS than
for most.  We do not distinguish between closed wontfix, closed invalid,
closed works-for-me, or closed fixed.  So you really can't draw any strong
conclusions from the mere fact the bug is closed.  Some people add the
wontfix or unreproducible tags when closing, but a lot of people don't,
and it's not mandatory.

I would only assume a bug was fixed if I saw it closed by a changelog
entry.  Anything other than that would require reading the bug log to
understand what happened.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   

Re: Debian does not have customers

[The Wanderer]

On 2016-09-20 at 19:00, Santiago Vila wrote:

> [ Please don't Cc:me ]
> 
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 11:29:14PM +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:
> 
>> Can you please explain to me how do you understand the following
>> statements in the DSC?
> 
> Of course I can.
> 
>> 3. We will not hide problems [...]
> 
> This means the BTS is visible to everybody, even anonymously. In
> other words, the BTS is not facebook, it's the old good open web.
> 
> It does not mean anybody has the right to decide on what bug I will
> be working tomorrow, because we are an organization made by
> volunteers.

I think the logic here is something like:

A closed bug is presumptively a fixed bug (because bugs which have been
fixed get closed).

An open bug is presumptively a non-fixed bug.

Therefore, to close a bug which has not been fixed is to pretend that
the problem reported in that bug has been fixed, i.e., does not
currently exist.

Therefore, to close a bug which has not been fixed is to attempt to hide
the problem reported in that bug, by making it appear as though that bug
has been fixed.


Russ has provided a rationale for why leaving insufficient-data bugs
open is not a good idea for many kinds of projects, and I believe for
why Debian would be one of them; I'm not sure I necessarily accept that
rationale, but it is a solid one. That doesn't invalidate the above
logic, however, only explain why it may not be able to prevail in the
circumstances which we have to live under.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Santiago Vila]

[ Please don't Cc:me ]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 11:29:14PM +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:
> Can you please explain to me how do you understand the following statements in
> the DSC?

Of course I can.

>3. We will not hide problems [...]

This means the BTS is visible to everybody, even anonymously.
In other words, the BTS is not facebook, it's the old good open web.

It does not mean anybody has the right to decide on what bug I will be
working tomorrow, because we are an organization made by volunteers.

> 4. Our priorities are our users and free software [...]

This means a lot of things. One of them is that we don't boycott the
use of Debian with non-free software.

But similarly to point 3, this one does not mean anybody has the right
to decide on what bug I will be working tomorrow, because we are still
an organization made by volunteers.

> For me these are the most valuable rules in this project, but unfortunately I
> see that more and more new contributers ignore them.

You mean new contributors like Russ or myself?

> I feel that this d-d list becomes more political than technical and this is
> something making me more and more sad. I did love this project and gave it my
> time, but feel more and more frustrated each time I read this list.

There was a time in which newly uploaded packages were announced here,
in -devel. If you miss such technical content I recommend that you
read debian-bugs-rc or debian-devel-changes instead, those ones are
really fun to read.

Thanks.

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Abou Al Montacir]

Sorry, I've promised not to react anymore to this subject, but I felt myself
obliged after the manifest and explicit violation, on my sense, of the DSC by
some people claiming that they contribute to Debian only for their own sake and
do not care about users frustration caused by their poor SW quality.

On Tue, 2016-09-20 at 12:46 +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> Bart, you have taken the gift analogy in a too literal sense, but it's
> just an analogy, and it may have its flaws.
> 
> Instead of a gift, I see it more like a fruit that you take from a tree.
Can you please explain to me how do you understand the following statements in
the DSC?

   1. ...
   2. ...
   3. We will not hide problemsWe will keep our entire bug report database open 
forpublic view at all times. Reports that people file online will promptly 
becomevisible to others.
   4. Our priorities are our users and free softwareWe will be guided by the 
needs ofour users and the free software community. We will place their 
interests firstin our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for 
operation in manydifferent kinds of computing environments. We will not object 
to non-free worksthat are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to 
charge a fee topeople who create or use such works. We will allow others to 
createdistributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without 
any feefrom us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated 
system ofhigh-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent 
such usesof the system.
When I decided to join Debian I did accept those statement, did you and the
others.
For me these are the most valuable rules in this project, but unfortunately I
see that more and more new contributers ignore them. I don't say most of
contributers but probably the most noisy one that react systematically on any
thread but instead of trying to solve the technical problem, they bring an
ethical one and try to enforce their point of view on the subject.

I feel that this d-d list becomes more political than technical and this is
something making me more and more sad. I did love this project and gave it my
time, but feel more and more frustrated each time I read this list.

I don't want to blame anyone, but just kindly ask to keep discussions in line
with Debian social contract and constitution. That is in my understanding
committing to help Debian, users in order to make it the best operating system.
That was true few years ago (at least it was the most stable one). It becomes
less and less true.

--
Cheers,
About Al Montacir,


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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Santiago Vila]

Bart, you have taken the gift analogy in a too literal sense, but it's
just an analogy, and it may have its flaws.

Instead of a gift, I see it more like a fruit that you take from a tree.

The tree definitely does not expect anything from you in return, and
you don't owe anything to the tree. The tree is not creating a
personal relation with you, and you are not creating a personal
relation with the tree.

The tree has a lot of fruits for you to take. Some of them are mature
and good to eat, some of them are not. It is you who decide which of
the fruits are good for you, not the tree. You would never blame the
tree after taking a fruit which is not good to eat.

Also, if you like the fruits from the tree, you might want to care
about the tree, so that it gives more and better fruits, but this is
in no way required, because this tree is very special and taking a
fruit from it does not make the same fruit unavailable to anybody else.

Now, if you can explain how you can make a tree "liable" or "responsible"
for producing a fruit which was not mature enough for you, I'm sure
that it would be a very interesting read.

So I would really forget about the gift comparison, as I think it
didn't work for you to understand the issue.

Thanks.

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Steve Langasek schreef op 20-09-2016 1:26:


To summarize:

 - Russ has patiently tried to help you understand why the relationship
   between Debian and its users is *not* a customer-vendor 
relationship, and

   users do *not* have the right to expect that Debian, or a particular
   Debian developer, fix their personal problem
 - You have responded by telling someone with 20 years of experience in 
Free
   Software why he's wrong when he talks about the kind of relationship 
that
   he's willing to have with his users, that he does not have the right 
of
   self-determination that he is asserting, and that your world view is 
the

   correct one instead of his.

So thanks, I guess, for being an object lesson in why it's necessary 
for

Free Software developers to set boundaries in their work?


I don't think you realized that when I wrote my original message I was 
trying to shed some light on what other people think and feel.


It is also clear that Russ has responded much more kindly to my last 
message than you here, so what makes you think you speak in his name 
then? But I don't have time for it now, will get back to it later (thank 
you Russ!).


I just think it is remarkable that when you try to explain the mindsets 
of other people (perhaps, possibly including my own, but still, I was 
talking about other people and what they feel when they say certain 
things, and what they mean when they say certain things) it is taken as 
a personal assault and you go and attack the messenger.


I say "the sun is low in the sky" and you attack me for putting the sun 
low in the sky.


Or for claiming that the sun should be low in the sky.

I say "people are upset that they've lost work" and you respond by 
saying "if you think it is our duty to ensure that you (with emphasis on 
you) don't lose work, you're mistaken".


It would be helpful if you could put some distance into it and talk of 
these things as a "disinterested" person. Just because I voice some 
opinions doesn't mean they are my own, or that they are my own 
exclusively, or that it was my intent to voice my own opinions.


But you grab onto it like a madman, so to speak, and attack everything 
I've said as if the intent of it was to attack you; I would say that an 
opinion cannot attack anything, it is merely a thought, and you can put 
it on a rock in the desert and it won't do anything, it will just sit 
there, so to speak.


A thought is an object, it cannot attack you. Particularly if I am 
merely relaying the thoughts of other people as my own perhaps, but that 
was not the intent. If I merely say "some people feel that" or "when 
they say these things, they mean..." then it is not a personal assault 
and you should not take it as such.


I was trying to explain why people think a certain way and that is all I 
did. In fact, I merely told why they /feel/ a certain way, not even why 
they think that way (there is nothing wrong with thinking, right).


Moreoever everything you accuse me of in the above fragment you write, 
you do yourself. I will leave it at that.

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 12:13:42AM +0200, Bart Schouten wrote:

> The idea of a gift is that it is free. You most assuredly know that in open
> source software is not considered to be a free gift, but something that
> requires a "retribution" (contribution in return).

Check your assumptions.  This is most definitely *not* the position of many
contributors to our community.

> >Maybe, given the above, you can see how weird this looks for you to say
> >this about someone who gave you a gift.

> I don't agree with your gift statements. I hold a different tenure about
> this. If I gave my sister a computer that would not be as easy to use (which
> all computers are, in a sense) then for the living hell of me I would be
> expected to take care of it indefinitely.



> >But you don't get to do that.  I refuse to grant you that sort of
> >authority over my life; I find it intrusive and, despite your generally
> >polite phrasing, exceptionally rude at its core.  I don't think you're
> >intending to be rude, but that is the result.  Just imagine saying these
> >things to a family member who had given you a gift, and I think you'll
> >understand my feeling.

> I don't think you understand my family.

To summarize:

 - Russ has patiently tried to help you understand why the relationship
   between Debian and its users is *not* a customer-vendor relationship, and
   users do *not* have the right to expect that Debian, or a particular
   Debian developer, fix their personal problem
 - You have responded by telling someone with 20 years of experience in Free
   Software why he's wrong when he talks about the kind of relationship that
   he's willing to have with his users, that he does not have the right of
   self-determination that he is asserting, and that your world view is the
   correct one instead of his.

So thanks, I guess, for being an object lesson in why it's necessary for
Free Software developers to set boundaries in their work?

  https://nm.debian.org/public/people

As long as your name does not appear at this URL, you get to decide for
exactly 0 Debian Developers what they spend their time on in Debian.

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org


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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

Bart Schouten  writes:

> I am just going to respond point by point. I was not merely talking
> about open source here.

But I was.  :)  I'm not particularly interested in talking about anything
else, since that's the point of this discussion: Debian as a free software
project, and what that means for our relationship with our users.

I do greatly appreciate your in-depth explanation of where you're coming
from.  The ideas of mutuality that you talk about resonate with me as
well, and I'm not after some sort of one-sided relationship.  But I think
we're talking past each other a bit in that this is exactly the point: the
customer model is one-sided, except for the money flow.

You were specifically talking about the free software relationship with
users who do not have the technical capabilities to contribute to the
development of the software, so that's what I'm focusing on.  In that
situation, I think the gift characterization is accurate.  If people are
actively collaborating together on a project, each contributing pieces of
it, this becomes a somewhat different scenario of a mutual project where
everyone is adding their piece to build something together.  But that
inherently involves collaboration, which isn't the context of this thread.

(In a sense, we're all collaboratively building human society together,
but I think that sense is too abstract to help much when trying to decide
specifically how the Debian Project should deal with incoming bug reports,
although it's worth keeping in mind when deciding when and how to
volunteer one's time.)

> The idea of a gift is that it is free. You most assuredly know that in
> open source software is not considered to be a free gift, but something
> that requires a "retribution" (contribution in return).

I most assuredly don't know anything of the kind!  In fact, I completely
disagree with that statement!

No one is required to contribute to my open source projects in order to
use them.  In fact, if I required such a thing, it would not be open
source; it's explicitly ruled out by the definition.

Maybe you're talking about copyleft licenses specifically?  Those require
that *if* you make modifications *and* you distribute them to other
people, *then* you have to provide source.  But that absolutely doesn't
require you to contribute in kind!  You can use the software and modify it
all you want for your personal use without any sort of in-kind
contribution.

(That said, I'm one of those free software developers who prefers not to
use copyleft because I don't like the sorts of relationships that are
created by long legal documents, although I do respect what advocates of
copyleft are trying to accomplish.)

> And of course I recognise that. But it's the same for /everyone/. You're
> not special here. The problem is that you think you're so special, and
> you're not. EVERYONE has to deal with support burdens.

I don't think I'm special in the slightest.  In fact, the whole reason why
I care so much about this issue to be discussing it in debian-devel at
this length is because I think I'm not special at all.  The support burden
problems I've seen are ones I think other people struggle with, and I
think being clearer about what the expectations and responsibilities are
is better for everyone involved.  Part of managing that support burden is
knowing how to say no clearly and forthrightly, rather than saying no by
default by keeping around bugs that will never be responded to and feeling
guilty about them.

Also, this is an important principal of the Debian Project.  See 2.1.1 of
the Debian Constitution:

1. Nothing in this constitution imposes an obligation on anyone to do work
   for the Project. A person who does not want to do a task which has been
   delegated or assigned to them does not need to do it. However, they
   must not actively work against these rules and decisions properly made
   under them.

It's our first general rule for a reason.

Anyway (snipping quite a lot here), I think you're working from a
different definition of gift than I was, and I probably muddled the waters
by talking so much about personal gifts to specific people.  Free software
isn't that sort of gift; it's a gift to the public, which is a different
sort of thing, since it doesn't create those sorts of personal
relationships.  It's a gift to strangers, a way of saying "I made this
thing, and if you find it useful, you can use it too."

> This can only imply one of two things:

> - the gifts you give are fundamentally broken or incomplete or unfinished
> and require outside resources to be able to use them
> - the gifts you give are fundamentally broken or incomplete or unfinished
> and require outside resources to be able to use them.

> There is no other option here.

Yes.  I believe this is true of all free software.  If it's not broken
now, it will be at some point.  This is just how software is.

If you don't want the gift, that's fine!  I have no 

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Russ Allbery schreef op 19-09-2016 21:55:

The relationship absolutely exists.  But it's not a customer 
relationship.

It's much closer to the relationship between a gift giver and a gift
recipient.  If you use that as a guide, I think everything becomes
clearer.


I am just going to respond point by point. I was not merely talking 
about open source here.



I think responsibility is a confusing word here, and the situation 
becomes

clearer when you look at gifts.


Again, I was not just talking about open source here. You are 
confounding things by treating open source as an explicitly separate 
category, and thereby pollute everything that you speak of, because now 
suddenly my baker giving me bread is also a "gift" received by me.


The idea of a gift is that it is free. You most assuredly know that in 
open source software is not considered to be a free gift, but something 
that requires a "retribution" (contribution in return).


Above, I was speaking of stuff you put out in the world. In a sense that 
can apply equally well to some commercial entity. The difference of 
course is that with a commercial entity there is a contractual 
relationship even though in the real world it is very hard for a 
customer (consumer) to make good on that relationship.


I mean that as an analogy. You can treat open source as a completely 
separate phenomemon: but witness and observe that as a "customer" you 
often have a hard time getting your voice heard as well.


And what you phrase above (that I didn't quote) is, in commercial 
enterprises, often known as the "support burden".


In fact I have known people who made a living (or partly, at least) 
selling computers or configuring them and who also became burdened by 
support demands they could not fulfill.


Again, your case is not all that different from what commercial entities 
(or persons, doing it for a living or making money) go through.


And of course I recognise that. But it's the same for /everyone/. You're 
not special here. The problem is that you think you're so special, and 
you're not. EVERYONE has to deal with support burdens.


Some people profess to never ever do anything again for an acquaintance, 
for instance, because what looked like a 2 hour ordeal turned into a 
many week nightmare, for example.


This was not "open source", this was "sure, I'll do that for you". I 
myself have witnessed that and probably left some sour grapes back when 
I was young even. I had promised to write a little software program for 
a little database thing a friend's father needed.


But as these things go they expected free work from me without having to 
do anything for it themselves, so I did not get any visits, nor any real 
interest, only demands for when the thing would be finished. In 
retrospect, I do not blame myself for taking on the task, I just think 
people are or become extremely ungrateful when something is "free".


I was about 15 back then, or even maybe 14. Don't know. In general what 
you do for free, the other person will throw in the dump.


They didn't have to do anything for it, so it held no value for them.





(Disclaimer: this is from a very American concept of gifting, and I
realize that gifts work differently in other cultures.  I don't know
enough of the overall anthropology to be able to translate; hopefully 
the

concept is still clear.)


Native Americans had a different concept ;-).

They called the whole tribe "cousin" and expected, basically, that if 
anyone had food, they'd share it.


But one of their most glorious moments was when they gave away 
everything they had. They held celebrations where the only purpose was 
to give away everything until almost nothing remained. Until they had 
almost nothing left. This they considered the greatness of their 
culture, because it ensured that no one would ever go without.





Maybe, given the above, you can see how weird this looks for you to say
this about someone who gave you a gift.


I don't agree with your gift statements. I hold a different tenure about 
this. If I gave my sister a computer that would not be as easy to use 
(which all computers are, in a sense) then for the living hell of me I 
would be expected to take care of it indefinitely.


Anything else would be a lie and an insult, for I would be giving 
something that I knew would be broken, or at least something I knew, or 
could have known, that she had not the skills to deal with. Then I 
should either not give it at all, or give it knowing that she will 
require my aid for the most part if something goes wrong with it.


My relationship with her does not end the moment I give her something 
that she needs me to use. If I give something, I stand behind it (or at 
least want to stand behind it) -- in fact many times I would rather 
destroy something than give it to someone, because I do not want to give 
people stuff that I consider not having any value or worth.


Moreoever, if I give someone something with the 

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Russ Allbery]

Bart Schouten  writes:

> When people insist on using a form of "client" or "customer" what they
> want is for the developer-user relationship to be recognised and not
> faded away by saying "there are no users, there are only developers".

The relationship absolutely exists.  But it's not a customer relationship.
It's much closer to the relationship between a gift giver and a gift
recipient.  If you use that as a guide, I think everything becomes
clearer.

But if you act like a customer and attempt to guilt me into feeling a
sense of obligation towards you for my hobby activities, I for one am far
more likely to react with hostility, and to stop listening to you
entirely.  Not only is this unpleasant for both of us individually, but it
also destroys your ability to get *any* fix made by the developer going
forward, so it's not in your best interests.

I *have* to severely limit contact like that if someone starts trying to
guilt me into a sense of obligation, just as a matter of personal
boundaries.  This is something that I'm personally susceptible to, and
that people have in the past used to manipulate me in ways that were
unhealthy for me.  So I have to maintain some pretty firm boundaries here
for my own well-being.  From talking to other open source developers, this
is a *very common* problem, and others make similar decisions (or, at
least in my opinion, suffer from not doing so).

> When people take up positions or create software they become the
> originators of that software and also obtain a certain responsibility if
> their goal is for other people to use it as well; ie. if they distribute
> it.

I think responsibility is a confusing word here, and the situation becomes
clearer when you look at gifts.

(Disclaimer: this is from a very American concept of gifting, and I
realize that gifts work differently in other cultures.  I don't know
enough of the overall anthropology to be able to translate; hopefully the
concept is still clear.)

If I give you a gift, I have no *responsibility* for that gift continuing
to work.  I might feel a *desire* for that gift to continue to work, and I
may want very much to help you and may continue to give you more labor to
try to make it work, usually because I'm enjoying that process at some
level or enjoy the idea of you using my gift.  But it's not a
responsibility in the sense that I can also decide not to do those things,
and you can decide to discard the gift, give it to someone else, or just
not use it.  It's a gift.  That's how gifts work.

If you want a *support contract*, which is what you're describing, that's
not something that usually comes with a gift (unless someone explicitly
gave you a support contract as a gift, which is part of what I'm arguing
that Debian should not promise to do because we're not actually capable of
following through on such a gift reliably).  If someone gave you some new
electronic device, you would not expect them to answer questions about it
and help you with it into the indefinite future.  If that electronic
device became incredibly useful to you and solved a deep problem that you
had to the degree that you couldn't live without it, you would of course
expect to have to become expert in it yourself or hire someone else who
was.  That's *way* too much burden to put on the person who gave you the
device as a gift in the first place.

For example, someone gave me a Fitbit fitness tracker as a gift a year and
a half ago.  It no longer holds a charge.  Should I contact that person
and complain about that problem and ask them to fix it?  Of course not!
Most of us would be appalled at that, since it's a serious breach of
social etiquette.  It's on me to either get it repaired, buy a new one, or
decide to live without it.

> Once you put something out into the world, you become in a sense
> responsible for it, because you have allowed other people to use it and
> now they are dependent on you.

Maybe, given the above, you can see how weird this looks for you to say
this about someone who gave you a gift.  What you're essentially arguing
for, perhaps not intending it, is for us to abandon volunteer free
software entirely.  You're saying that it's not possible to give a gift,
that all gifts create an expectation of future support, and therefore the
only people who can give gifts of free software in the world are the ones
that can promise to support it indefinitely.  In other words, companies.
So the only Linux distributions that should exist are ones like Red Hat or
SuSE or Ubuntu that are supported by companies.

I think you'd understand why I'm not in agreement with that.  :)

I realize that you're trying to moderate this position a bit, but your
frame is still entirely wrong, in my opinion.  You're putting an
obligation on me and then saying that, well, you might deign to relax that
if something makes it impossible for me to maintain software, or if other
challenging situations come up.  If you think my 

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Bart Schouten]

Ben Finney schreef op 16-09-2016 6:19:


If the distinction were inconsequential I would agree. It's not
inconsequential, though, so that's why this is so valuable: it draws
attention to the false and misleading idea that the Debian Project has 
a

“customer” relationship with anyone.


Pardon me for sticking my nose in.

I'd just want to contribute two thoughts:

- on the one hand doing something only for the customer (but not because 
you want it yourself) is a detrimental thing to me.
- on the other hand effacing the developer-user relationship by claiming 
that all users are developers (and all developers are users, in a sense) 
is also detrimental to me.


When people insist on using a form of "client" or "customer" what they 
want is for the developer-user relationship to be recognised and not 
faded away by saying "there are no users, there are only developers".


The problem with treating every user as a developer is a difference in 
skill. Someone who can fix an issue may be one of the few who can do so 
within reasonable time and as such it is a matter of efficiency.


If I am some developer with great skill and experience in a certain 
package, fixing an issue may take me 5 minutes. Someone else may need to 
study for weeks to do the same thing.


When people take up positions or create software they become the 
originators of that software and also obtain a certain responsibility if 
their goal is for other people to use it as well; ie. if they distribute 
it.


Once you put something out into the world, you become in a sense 
responsible for it, because you have allowed other people to use it and 
now they are dependent on you. Maybe the goal is for them to be 
independent, but you have allowed for them to become dependent on your 
skill, particularly if the program or product is broken or contains 
bugs. That means you would have put something out into the world that 
was unfinished and now suffer for it as a consequence.


When people speak in terms of customer or client what they really mean 
is that they object to this effacing of responsibility; that the user 
who has 5% software development skill is equally as responsible for the 
product as the one with 100% skill that actually created it (perhaps).


What people don't want is for everything to be equal. If it's my job to 
report bugs, then maybe it is your job to fix it. But we don't all have 
the exact same responsibilities and saying that any user can come in and 
fix that issue that you have a hard time fixing yourself, just isn't 
true.


What people really want is for the people who have made themselves 
responsible for something, and they have become a client to that as a 
result of that, to also honour that responsibility if they can. And too 
often in open source (not necessarily Debian) responsibility is refuted 
or ignored or terminated. The "no warranty" clause is of course an 
example of that. But by producing software, you fill a space. If you 
hadn't filled that space, someone else would have come in and done the 
same, but possibly better. By merely filling a space (and having a 
project no one can get around) you become responsible for having taken 
that space and having created expectations of your ability to 
proficiently fill that space; if you weren't planning to do it well, 
then why would you have done it in the first place? If you are not 
planning to do it well, then maybe it is better if you leave, if that is 
the case, and leave it to someone else.


That's just how I feel about it. I am hesitant to make myself 
responsible for something I will not be able to manage, because people 
become dependent on you the moment you make something available.


Because in open source many projects are unfinished and are released 
early, there is an ongoing depedency relationship to those developers 
who are releasing that unfinished products, because had the product been 
actually finished (and completely) the developer could have said: here 
it is, it is complete unto itself, you don't need me anymore. But now, 
it is not the case.


Because many software is hard to use (in a sense, and it is) and often 
ill-document (often the source itself) people remain needed.


Their goal was to not be needed anymore, but the way they have done it 
ensures that they remain needed.


That was not the intent, but it was the result because of the way things 
are done.


A commercial package is often so complete unto itself (and even e.g. 
TrueCrypt was that, if I may say so) that for the largest part of my 
life I have been using commercial software and never ever ever ever ever 
ever ever needed customer support for it.


I did not need to go to some developer and say "this doesn't work" 
because they would already have taken care of it.


That's the merit of introducing a very little bit of commercialism into 
open source. Not because of payment or money, but because of the idea of 
being responsible for a product you put out there 

Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 04:49:54PM +, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2016-09-18 09:02:25 -0400 (-0400), The Wanderer wrote:
> [...]
> > There are many, many people who are users of Debian who do not
> > contribute to the development of Debian, except possibly by way of
> > filing bug reports.
> > 
> > As such, "people making Debian" is at most a subset of "users of
> > Debian", not another term for the same set.
> [...]
> 
> But (at least in many cases) users with specific needs not being met
> by the current developer base are also welcome to participate in
> addressing those needs rather than just waiting for someone else to
> do it for them. Debian helps those who help themselves.

Exactly.

To paraphrase JFK: My fellow Debian community, ask not what Debian can
do for you, ask what you can do for Debian.

Thanks.

Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2016-09-18 09:02:25 -0400 (-0400), The Wanderer wrote:
[...]
> There are many, many people who are users of Debian who do not
> contribute to the development of Debian, except possibly by way of
> filing bug reports.
> 
> As such, "people making Debian" is at most a subset of "users of
> Debian", not another term for the same set.
[...]

But (at least in many cases) users with specific needs not being met
by the current developer base are also welcome to participate in
addressing those needs rather than just waiting for someone else to
do it for them. Debian helps those who help themselves.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting The Wanderer (2016-09-18 15:02:25)
> On 2016-09-18 at 08:40, Santiago Vila wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 02:00:26PM +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:
> > 
> >> you will end being a community of geeks developing SW for 
> >> themselves only.
> > 
> > Debian is a volunteer project made by its users.
> > 
> > So we are already a community developing SW for ourselves, the 
> > users, and there is nothing wrong with that.
> > 
> > Once you realize that "people making Debian" and "its users" are 
> > really the same thing, you will see why this discussion does not 
> > make much sense.
> 
> One nitpick:
> 
> There are many, many people who are users of Debian who do not 
> contribute to the development of Debian, except possibly by way of 
> filing bug reports.

That exception is the whole point.

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private


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Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[The Wanderer]

On 2016-09-18 at 08:40, Santiago Vila wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 02:00:26PM +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:
> 
>> you will end being a community of geeks developing SW for
>> themselves only.
> 
> Debian is a volunteer project made by its users.
> 
> So we are already a community developing SW for ourselves, the
> users, and there is nothing wrong with that.
> 
> Once you realize that "people making Debian" and "its users" are
> really the same thing, you will see why this discussion does not make
> much sense.

One nitpick:

There are many, many people who are users of Debian who do not
contribute to the development of Debian, except possibly by way of
filing bug reports.

As such, "people making Debian" is at most a subset of "users of
Debian", not another term for the same set.

Yes, the developers of Debian are developing software for themselves -
but I'm pretty sure the point of what you quoted is in the word "only",
which you omitted from your rephrasing, and I'm not at all sure even all
Debian contributors would agree that they are contributing to Debian
_only_ for themselves and other Debian contributors.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 02:00:26PM +0200, Abou Al Montacir wrote:

> you will end being a community of geeks developing SW for themselves only.

Debian is a volunteer project made by its users.

So we are already a community developing SW for ourselves, the users,
and there is nothing wrong with that.

Once you realize that "people making Debian" and "its users" are really
the same thing, you will see why this discussion does not make much sense.

Thanks.

Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[Abou Al Montacir]

On Sat, 2016-09-17 at 13:11 +0200, W. Martin Borgert wrote:
> On 2016-09-16 21:26, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> > What about the term client? ;-)
> 
> What about the term "users"?
> 
> (We use the word already in our social contract
> and IMHO it serves us well.)
I see that most people are interested in the discussion for the sake of
discussion. I still received only 1 mail relevant: use strace to debug your
problem!

you can call it users, I call it customers or public or what ever! If you don't 
care about users then you will loose them and you be very happy to be anonymous 
project between billions on the web.

When I started using Debian it was because it was a project caring about 
quality. "We release when we are ready!" was the slogan. Meaning no time frame 
but quality!
Today Users say I can't use your SW anymore because it is freezing and you say 
we don't sell anything, we don't care.

I'll stop talking on this thread. I'll only add comment to the bug report 
whenever I have more related information to report. You can close it or ignore 
it. But be sure if you continue doing that and disappointing users, you will 
end being a community of geeks developing SW for themselves only. It is no more 
Debian and the biggest OS project, it will be an unknown project with big 
history showing how we can touch the summit and then fall down!

Sorry for that, you can answer or not, I'm not going to read this anymore.
-- 
Cheers,
Abou Al Montacir


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Re: Debian does not have customers, but users

[W. Martin Borgert]

On 2016-09-16 21:26, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> What about the term client? ;-)

What about the term "users"?

(We use the word already in our social contract
and IMHO it serves us well.)

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Ben Finney]

On 16-Sep-2016, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:

> What about [different terms for the relationship]?

Worth discussing, but not the issue in this thread IMO.

Yes, there surely are better terms to use for characterising the
relationship of Debian recipients to the Debian Project.

The issue is that the term “customer”, which some have argued should
pass without comment when people claim it, should be challenged
because of the false expectations and assumptions it carries. It does
not help to characterise the relationship with that term.

And that remains so, regardless of the merits of other terms.

-- 
 \  “I used to be an airline pilot. I got fired because I kept |
  `\   locking the keys in the plane. They caught me on an 80 foot |
_o__)stepladder with a coathanger.” —Steven Wright |
Ben Finney 


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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Nicholas D Steeves]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 02:19:00PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> "Jeremy T. Bouse"  writes:
> 
> > I'll start off by saying I haven't read the whole thread and only
> > caught this because of the subject line change.
> 
> I direct you to Russ's message in this thread that explains exactly why
> “customer” is a misleading term for the relationship being discussed, and:
> 
> > I'd have to ask how many of you actually have worked in large
> > enterprise environments? I've been working in both public and private
> > sector enterprise environments and the term "customer" is quite often
> > used to describe those whom we serve. Whether they are internal or
> > external customers and whether or not there is any payment involved.
> > The term merely means the consumer of the service we provide.
> 
> and please read Russ's message for why that *is* a reasonable
> implication of “customer”, and is exactly why that's *not* the
> relationship the Debian project has with Debian recipients.
> 
> > Having a long winded debate over the use of a term takes away from
> > the ability of actually accomplishing anything so it is better served
> > to move on and address the issue rather than be pedantic about
> > definitions.
> 
> If the distinction were inconsequential I would agree. It's not
> inconsequential, though, so that's why this is so valuable: it draws
> attention to the false and misleading idea that the Debian Project has a
> “customer” relationship with anyone.
> 
> -- 
>  \  “I don't want to live peacefully with difficult realities, and |
>   `\ I see no virtue in savoring excuses for avoiding a search for |
> _o__)real answers.” —Paul Z. Myers, 2009-09-12 |
> Ben Finney
> 

What about the term client? ;-)  No really, it lets you say things like:

  * The client privilege of a Debian user is freedom.
  * Debian clients will always receive free security updates from
Debian's servers.
  * Anyone can be a Debian client.

And yes, I'm aware "client" is arguably also a cognitive construct of
capitalism, because it implies the transactional relationship
inculcated by everyday monetary transactions...but once someone
submits a bug to the BTS I think he/she can be called a client,
because the system has authorised a call with a response in the form
of a numbered ticket associated with an email record of the claim.
All bugs make a claim to the promise of [1].

My suspicion is that the points being made are related to different
interpretations of the idea:

  * Debian serves the community. [1]


Stay kind,
Nicholas

[1] The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of
the highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user
community...a distribution is created based on the needs and wants of
the users rather than the needs and wants of the constructor.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html


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Re: Debian does not have customers

[Ben Finney]

"Jeremy T. Bouse"  writes:

> I'll start off by saying I haven't read the whole thread and only
> caught this because of the subject line change.

I direct you to Russ's message in this thread that explains exactly why
“customer” is a misleading term for the relationship being discussed, and:

> I'd have to ask how many of you actually have worked in large
> enterprise environments? I've been working in both public and private
> sector enterprise environments and the term "customer" is quite often
> used to describe those whom we serve. Whether they are internal or
> external customers and whether or not there is any payment involved.
> The term merely means the consumer of the service we provide.

and please read Russ's message for why that *is* a reasonable
implication of “customer”, and is exactly why that's *not* the
relationship the Debian project has with Debian recipients.

> Having a long winded debate over the use of a term takes away from
> the ability of actually accomplishing anything so it is better served
> to move on and address the issue rather than be pedantic about
> definitions.

If the distinction were inconsequential I would agree. It's not
inconsequential, though, so that's why this is so valuable: it draws
attention to the false and misleading idea that the Debian Project has a
“customer” relationship with anyone.

-- 
 \  “I don't want to live peacefully with difficult realities, and |
  `\ I see no virtue in savoring excuses for avoiding a search for |
_o__)real answers.” —Paul Z. Myers, 2009-09-12 |
Ben Finney

Re: Debian does not have customers

[Jeremy T. Bouse]

On 9/15/2016 10:19 PM, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2016-09-15 at 22:03, Ben Finney wrote:
>
>> The Wanderer  writes:
>>
>>> On 2016-09-15 at 21:26, Wookey wrote:
>>>
 I reckon a lot of us would be happier if you [Russ] (and Abou)
 used the term 'users', rather than 'customers'. I know I think
 that being a customer involves payment.
>>> That was exactly my point: that although many people (including
>>> me!) think that [the term “customer” entails payment from the
>>> customer], other people do not - and, IMO, refusing or otherwise
>>> failing to understand what they mean when they use the term that
>>> way is not helpful.
>> That's a point of disagreement, then. I think Russ's drawing
>> attention to the fact Debian does not have customers is helpful: it
>> clarifies the discussion and explicitly acknowledges a fact that may
>> have been ignored by the person using that term ambiguously.
>>
>> As Russ describes so eloquently, that ambiguity glosses an essential 
>> distinction the Debian Project has from other superficially similar 
>> entities people may be more familiar with.
>>
>> Ignoring that distinction is harmful to effective communication,
>> because it fosters an unachievable expectation. Effort to expose and
>> avoid that particular ambiguity is helpful because it dispels a false
>> expectation.
> I would agree with all of that.
>
> I simply maintain that to say that "we don't sell anything, therefore we
> don't have customers" (as is the original statement to which I
> responded) is to fail to effectively communicate, by failing to respond
> to the meaning of the term which the person who used it intended.
>
> That's not to say that we have to accept and adopt that intended
> meaning of that term; providing an explanation of why it is not suitable
> for Debian (perhaps by linking to an existing explanation, for which
> purpose Russ's own might be a candidate) could well be a more suitable
> option.
>
> To see people talking past each other because they're using different
> definitions of their words and aren't acknowledging that fact, however,
> is actively unpleasant for me. Russ _is_ acknowledging that fact, and
> may well be helping bring the difference into light for others; however,
> the original comment to which I responded did not seem to be doing so.
>
> (At this point, I don't think continuing this subthread any further is
> likely to be particularly helpful...)
I'll start off by saying I haven't read the whole thread and only
caught this because of the subject line change.

I'd have to ask how many of you actually have worked in large
enterprise environments? I've been working in both public and private
sector enterprise environments and the term "customer" is quite often
used to describe those whom we serve. Whether they are internal or
external customers and whether or not there is any payment involved. The
term merely means the consumer of the service we provide.

Having a long winded debate over the use of a term takes away from
the ability of actually accomplishing anything so it is better served to
move on and address the issue rather than be pedantic about definitions.

Re: Debian does not have customers

[The Wanderer]

On 2016-09-15 at 22:03, Ben Finney wrote:

> The Wanderer  writes:
> 
>> On 2016-09-15 at 21:26, Wookey wrote:
>> 
>>> I reckon a lot of us would be happier if you [Russ] (and Abou)
>>> used the term 'users', rather than 'customers'. I know I think
>>> that being a customer involves payment.
>> 
>> That was exactly my point: that although many people (including
>> me!) think that [the term “customer” entails payment from the
>> customer], other people do not - and, IMO, refusing or otherwise
>> failing to understand what they mean when they use the term that
>> way is not helpful.
> 
> That's a point of disagreement, then. I think Russ's drawing
> attention to the fact Debian does not have customers is helpful: it
> clarifies the discussion and explicitly acknowledges a fact that may
> have been ignored by the person using that term ambiguously.
> 
> As Russ describes so eloquently, that ambiguity glosses an essential 
> distinction the Debian Project has from other superficially similar 
> entities people may be more familiar with.
> 
> Ignoring that distinction is harmful to effective communication,
> because it fosters an unachievable expectation. Effort to expose and
> avoid that particular ambiguity is helpful because it dispels a false
> expectation.

I would agree with all of that.

I simply maintain that to say that "we don't sell anything, therefore we
don't have customers" (as is the original statement to which I
responded) is to fail to effectively communicate, by failing to respond
to the meaning of the term which the person who used it intended.

That's not to say that we have to accept and adopt that intended
meaning of that term; providing an explanation of why it is not suitable
for Debian (perhaps by linking to an existing explanation, for which
purpose Russ's own might be a candidate) could well be a more suitable
option.

To see people talking past each other because they're using different
definitions of their words and aren't acknowledging that fact, however,
is actively unpleasant for me. Russ _is_ acknowledging that fact, and
may well be helping bring the difference into light for others; however,
the original comment to which I responded did not seem to be doing so.

(At this point, I don't think continuing this subthread any further is
likely to be particularly helpful...)

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw



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