Re: [gentoo-project] Proposal to ease flames

[Roy Bamford]

Steve,

I've in lined my words of wisdom ... you may not agree with them but 
they are mine, after all.

On 2007.08.05 02:36, Steve Long wrote:
> I was thinking about the recent discussion re flames and firefighting
> on the dev m-l. One thing that occurred to me, as a user who has been
> on one side of those, is that it would have been better if I had
> never been able to post more than two posts in a day. (I mean this
> for the technical dev m-l, not project.)
That's ok as long as you only want to respond to flames and be off 
topic. It would limit the noise a non dev can create. As soon as you 
want to use -dev for its intended purpose, it would cramp your style.
This could not be usefully automated

>
> That's plenty for me to say "I think that's out of order" and to
> answer a response, but it also means I can't get too emotional if I
> get flamed by a stressed-out dev.
Nor can you easily take part in technical discussions, should you want 
to :)

> After all, since the proctors have gone, there's no one to respond in
> anything like mail-list time in the (admittedly unlikely ;) event
> that there is another flamewar on the dev list and more cogently
> no-one to mute a troublesome user (in real time). A dev who is
> consistently anti-social (especially out of the blue when they should
> just ignore the thread) can be dealt with by devrel. (And have been
> in the past.)
After the fallout from the "Bubble thread" that lead directly to the 
death of the proctors, -dev appears to have calmed down. I'm not sure 
if that's because the proctors got so much publicity over that one 
incident that everyone knows of it and reviewed their behavior, or if 
they have just gone on summer holidays. I think this list will help 
take the pressure of -dev too.
>
> If the user is making a valid point, surely others will post in
> support, and in any event they can respond the next day. That would
> minimise the chance that a user unused to the rough-and-tumble of dev
> behaviour would react in a hostile manner, and can in no way be seen
> as censorship of the user community, at least to my mind.
If you are making a valid technical point, your posts don't need to be 
throttled. If not, you should not post to -dev at all.

>
> What do you think?
>
Social problems demand human in the loop control. That's why courts 
have (skilled ?) judges for sentencing, not just a look up table of 
offence - punishment.

A part of Gentoos problem and probably other OS projects, is that most 
devs are still learning their social skills. They are school or 
university students.
> --
> gentoo-project@g.o mailing list
>

Regards,

Roy Bamford
(NeddySeagoon)
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