Re: [gentoo-council] User Relations authority

[Thomas Anderson]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 09:24:53PM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > > | 4.  Here's what I think is meant by a complete ban.  *These are only my
> > > | own inferences from reading between the lines and trying to put
> > > | different comments together in some coherent fashion.*
> > > |      Under some rather unclear conditions, some combination of
> > > |      devrel/userrel/trustees/infra could decide to impose a complete,
> > > |      permanent ban on a member (user or, I suppose developer) of our
> > > |      community.  This would have the following effects:
> > >
> > > Some people seem to support that userrel can make such decisions on its
> > > own. As I've stated, as an userrel member, I was willing to involve
> > > other teams. We also need to agree to which body should appeals be sent.
> >
> > I would not support giving userrel that authority or userrel+devrel that
> > authority.  Now, I oppose this absolutely.  But in general I don't thing
> > any group(s) in gentoo should have such sweeping authority to make such
> > major decisions secretely in private.  If we want to impose such a ban
> > on someone, we really should have the courage and resolve to work in
> > public.
>
> I dislike your use of emotional words to imply that anyone you disagree
> with is cowardly.

I'm going to argue from the perspective of the community here...

It seems to me that in the past the Gentoo community has always been
open to the community. We've accepted patches from many people, despite
their perhaps abrasive attitude towards us. Yet now, some are leaning towards
refusing patches from certain people, based not on their merit but on
their origin? In other words, a person's point on a mailing list may be
entirely valid and entirely undisputed, but since a subset of the community
holds that person in "contempt" or "poisonous", everyone has to simply
ignore the person's valid point? Doesn't this go against the "open
community" aspect of Gentoo, which has always been heralded as the
hallmark of our community?

> I think it's clear that your opinion does not necessarily represent the
> opinions of everyone else in Gentoo, so arguing that your empty set is
> Gentoo's empty set is not valid.

It certainly represents mine.