[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: [RFC]: gentoo-politics ML

[Steve Long]

Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 6/12/07, Alexander Gabert <pappy@g.o> wrote:
>> There are others like him and there will be others after him.  There
>> were even people doing that before him.
> As with trolls, theres more where they came for, but that doesn't make
> gentoo-ML 'different' to as to how we slay a troll.
>
> I agree with matthias. If somebody's a troll, then you ignore them,
> you make no attempt to reply to their post, and thus escape a
> massacre. Its just that some times people think that by _not_ replying
> to a trollish argument, that somehow the troll 'wins' . I figure, that
> this being a gentoo-dev room, most the people in here have their head
> screwed on and can know what a troll looks like when they see one, and
> act accordingly to the 'leave them alone and they'll go away' policy.
> Otherwise all your reply does is _guarantee_ they've won, because
> nothing you say or do about a troll, bar ignoring them, will make any
> good come to pass. Then either the troll will go away, or stop
> trolling.
>
I agree with you in the general case but not the specific. In this case, I
feel the constant drip-drip effect is depressing. Furthermore, outsiders
read the list and see these melodramatic claims about the uselessness of
the current development process which are never answered. From what you're
saying this is embarrassed silence, as with a senile relative. Until I was
informed of the error, I assumed it was because the troll was actually
right. He certainly has vocal allies on every Gentoo medium. I actually
used to believe their claims on the forums, I am forced to admit.

Normally a troll dies from being ignored as the attention is their reward.
In this case however, I feel the intention is political, to gain acceptance
for Paludis as the one true package manager, since after all Paludis is
useless without the portage tree. (Hence the troll's insistence that
the "ebuild tree" defines Gentoo, when in application terms ebuild is no
more or less than the portage file format. Using the same format to do the
same task in OpenOffice doesn't stop doc being the Word file format, for
example.) Why he can't just fork is beyond me; it's not like access to the
portage tree is restricted, as sabayon can attest.

The irony of the troll's complaints about Gentoo QA when his closest ally is
QA lead, is vintage though.


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