Re: [gentoo-project] Email from comrel -> Your recent contributions to the gentoo mailing lists

[Michał Górny]

On Tue, 6 Dec 2016 23:24:22 -0800
Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:

> On 12/06/2016 11:15 AM, Seemant Kulleen wrote:
> > The larger philosophical question is: Are we seriously banning people as
> > a community? What sort of community are we, in fact?
>
> I think that's largely speaking for itself here.
>
> It's clear that (a lack of) communication in this case and in Ian's did
> not prove to be fruitful. I hope Gentoo can improve in its community
> management in the future.
>
> I did not respond to William's e-mails mostly because they were
> off-topic in my thread, but I hold no ill will against him and feel he's
> just as entitled to a voice as anyone else. I think we're doing Gentoo a
> disservice (especially in Java land) by not having him help us. I
> disagree both with the decision to ban him (to outside readers: the
> greater developer community was not asked for their opinion) and the
> manner that William made his points (it was too much, too often).
>
> These happenings have severely dampened my view of the management within
> Gentoo and I will be voting accordingly next year.

You should really have tried working with him before forming
an opinion. Let me put up a few facts for you. Some people may actually
end up seeing some similarity between the two incidents.

First of all, William's technical competencies were, to say, lacking.
He may be very good in Java land but he is lacking in basic shell, not
to mention ebuild. His ebuilds end up doing the kind of three-flip
workaround for issues he himself introduced. If he was left to commit
freely, other people will end up having a lot of work cleaning up
after him.

Of course, every deficiency can be solved if one wants to learn.
However, William more than once shown that he's stuck in some point
in the past and refuses to move forward. If you try to teach him, soon
enough he's going to change to subject to either how important he is
(and therefore he doesn't need to learn, you should fix stuff you
think he does wrong), how bad Gentoo is these days or plainly to
offending you. I think you have seen a fair sample of that on the ml
lately.

So no, William is not suitable for commit access to ::gentoo. We really
don't have the manpower to fix all those issues, and I'm already tired
enough after one ex-developer leaving packages that could have never
worked (i.e. ebuilds that simply end up tripping on some 'die'
in the eclass that was always there) -- and we (the Python team) kept
hitting on those even a year later.

Finally, William tends to harass people who step on his toe, which can
happen pretty easily (i.e. via attempting to make him learn, see
above). If you do, you can expect to be privately and publicly harassed
for quite some time, at least to the point when he switches to
harassing someone else.

Believe it, it's really not nice or productive to be highlighted every
15 minutes by some irrelevant, jerky comment. Or be a topic of every
fourth mail. If you don't believe, you should try it.

As a side note, I should point out that we already had a similar case
in the past. I don't know if William would resort to that as well but
the other person even went as far as lying to other Gentoo users
and making them harass you privately.

So yes, maybe Java lost some. Gentoo may have lost a few potential
developers too. However, I believe that Gentoo was saved from a major
loss of developers and contributors which has already happened once due
to the previous person mentioned, and I'm pretty sure would follow
William's staying longer with us.

Hope this clears all the missing facts. I should point out that it's my
personal opinion, based on what I've seen and heard. Hope I didn't
betray anyone's confidentiality.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny