Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Email from comrel -> Your recent contributions to the gentoo mailing lists
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2016 11:24:30
Message-Id: 36034bad-4887-5a01-5fd3-f1a625810ddd@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Email from comrel -> Your recent contributions to the gentoo mailing lists by "Michał Górny"
1 On 12/07/2016 01:05 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
2 > On Tue, 6 Dec 2016 23:24:22 -0800
3 > Daniel Campbell <zlg@g.o> wrote:
4 >
5 >> On 12/06/2016 11:15 AM, Seemant Kulleen wrote:
6 >>> The larger philosophical question is: Are we seriously banning people as
7 >>> a community? What sort of community are we, in fact?
8 >>
9 >> I think that's largely speaking for itself here.
10 >>
11 >> It's clear that (a lack of) communication in this case and in Ian's did
12 >> not prove to be fruitful. I hope Gentoo can improve in its community
13 >> management in the future.
14 >>
15 >> I did not respond to William's e-mails mostly because they were
16 >> off-topic in my thread, but I hold no ill will against him and feel he's
17 >> just as entitled to a voice as anyone else. I think we're doing Gentoo a
18 >> disservice (especially in Java land) by not having him help us. I
19 >> disagree both with the decision to ban him (to outside readers: the
20 >> greater developer community was not asked for their opinion) and the
21 >> manner that William made his points (it was too much, too often).
22 >>
23 >> These happenings have severely dampened my view of the management within
24 >> Gentoo and I will be voting accordingly next year.
25 >
26 > You should really have tried working with him before forming
27 > an opinion. Let me put up a few facts for you. Some people may actually
28 > end up seeing some similarity between the two incidents.
29
30 To be fair, his exclusion from Gentoo kinda prevents me from having the
31 opportunity to work with him -- at least on Gentoo-related things. That
32 said, I'm open to any new information or facts presented. Before we get
33 into nitty gritty I want to thank you for taking the time and
34 consideration to reply so thoroughly and civilly.
35 >
36 > First of all, William's technical competencies were, to say, lacking.
37 > He may be very good in Java land but he is lacking in basic shell, not
38 > to mention ebuild. His ebuilds end up doing the kind of three-flip
39 > workaround for issues he himself introduced. If he was left to commit
40 > freely, other people will end up having a lot of work cleaning up
41 > after him.
42 >
43 > Of course, every deficiency can be solved if one wants to learn.
44 > However, William more than once shown that he's stuck in some point
45 > in the past and refuses to move forward. If you try to teach him, soon
46 > enough he's going to change to subject to either how important he is
47 > (and therefore he doesn't need to learn, you should fix stuff you
48 > think he does wrong), how bad Gentoo is these days or plainly to
49 > offending you. I think you have seen a fair sample of that on the ml
50 > lately.
51 >
52 > So no, William is not suitable for commit access to ::gentoo. We really
53 > don't have the manpower to fix all those issues, and I'm already tired
54 > enough after one ex-developer leaving packages that could have never
55 > worked (i.e. ebuilds that simply end up tripping on some 'die'
56 > in the eclass that was always there) -- and we (the Python team) kept
57 > hitting on those even a year later.
58
59 Are we talking the sort of errors that a quick bug report and/or IRC
60 ping should be able to fix, or a severe QA report that we all know we
61 shouldn't do (like something covered in the quizzes?). Regardless, it
62 seems fair to expect someone to be receptive (and hopefully learn
63 something) when they screw up. I agree that we can't have people at
64 Gentoo who aren't able to see flaws in their work and try to correct
65 them. Creating work for other devs is counteractive to our goals.
66
67 Would you or someone else be willing to show a few bug reports or
68 examples of things he's done that caused us a headache? I'd search
69 myself, but I don't really have much to go on.
70
71 > Finally, William tends to harass people who step on his toe, which can
72 > happen pretty easily (i.e. via attempting to make him learn, see
73 > above). If you do, you can expect to be privately and publicly harassed
74 > for quite some time, at least to the point when he switches to
75 > harassing someone else.
76 >
77 > Believe it, it's really not nice or productive to be highlighted every
78 > 15 minutes by some irrelevant, jerky comment. Or be a topic of every
79 > fourth mail. If you don't believe, you should try it.
80
81 Oh, I fully understand that. I've not been on the business end of that
82 particularly, but interruptions are a huge pain when you're trying to
83 focus on anything relating to code. I hope that we agree on that one. :)
84 >
85 > As a side note, I should point out that we already had a similar case
86 > in the past. I don't know if William would resort to that as well but
87 > the other person even went as far as lying to other Gentoo users
88 > and making them harass you privately.
89 >
90 > So yes, maybe Java lost some. Gentoo may have lost a few potential
91 > developers too. However, I believe that Gentoo was saved from a major
92 > loss of developers and contributors which has already happened once due
93 > to the previous person mentioned, and I'm pretty sure would follow
94 > William's staying longer with us.
95 >
96 > Hope this clears all the missing facts. I should point out that it's my
97 > personal opinion, based on what I've seen and heard. Hope I didn't
98 > betray anyone's confidentiality.
99 >
100
101 I think you've helped me see a bit more of the picture. I'm reluctant to
102 turn anyone away; I trust our usual methods of contributing are still
103 open to him (as they are for everyone else), should he have a change of
104 mind or heart. My thoughts on management remain, and I think better
105 information sharing (facts, evidence) can prevent huge threads like this
106 from happening. If further evidence confirms William's behavior then
107 I'll have to retract my statement regarding his contributing capacity.
108
109 Thanks again for sharing with me.
110 --
111 Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
112 OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net
113 fpr: AE03 9064 AE00 053C 270C 1DE4 6F7A 9091 1EA0 55D6

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