Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: formally allow qa to suspend commit rights

[Alan McKinnon]

On 01/22/14 14:34, Patrick Lauer wrote:
>> Do you realise the message that is sent by denying someone access? You
>> > are saying that person is not good enough to work on Gentoo. Do you
>> > really want to send that message?
> Yes. And I have no problem being the Evil Guy who pulls the trigger,
> err, presses the enter key.
>
> You are saying that *any* contribution should be accepted just to not
> hurt someones feelings.


No, I'm not even remotely saying that. Please go back and read gain what
I did say.

I never mentioned anything about "any contribution". What I did say
comes after the qualifier "by denying someone access", which is a very
far cry indeed from "any contribution".

I also have no problem being the Evil Guy, because I am that
sonofabitch. I really know what happens when you suspend/nuke/delete
access because I have done it. And every single time it was the wrong
thing to do.

The only time it was acceptable is for a runaway script or similar, or
an honest mistake where I can fix the fallout far faster than the user
can. As the sysadmin and root, I know more about the systems than the
users do, similarly in Gentoo land it's a fair assumption that the
average QA person is more knowledgeable about the tree and policies than
the average dev. So when QA takes action in a spirit of help and with
communication in place, all is good and things usually work out well.

When it swings the other way and suspension is done as a means of
punishment (to whatever degree) then QA has stepped beyond the bounds of
what QA is about and into something else.

I still don't see any suggestions in this thread on how to limit the
scope of what QA wants. No-one will seriously try prevent a good QA guy
from limiting damage, but what happens when QA itself abuses the policy?
And it will happen, we both know this. How does QA propose to curb that
downside?


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com