Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Trying to become a Gentoo Developer again spanning 8 years...

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 11:53:46AM -0400, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
> > However, I do think that in the end other distros do take measures to
> > deal with people who they feel cause trouble, even if it isn't
> > technical in nature.  I suspect that many distros go as far as booting
> > people.
> I do not think any has the history of such as does Gentoo. It would be
> interesting to see or learn. I believe the others also do what they can to
> mitigate and resolve issues amicably.
Yes, other distributions do go as far to boot troublesome people, both
technical and interpersonal, and it's been just as messy as Gentoo. I
know of some events, but I'm certain this is just a small sampling of
the events (high visibility and low). As you read below, you're really
going to want some popcorn. Even prior to having documents explicitly
titled with "Code of Conduct", the organizations did have some manner of
policies in place (FreeBSD esp.)

Debian's equivalent of DevRel is the "Account Maintainers", which, at
least a decade ago were significantly more of a "cabal" to those looking
for conspiratorial plots. I know of at least 4 Debian maintainers
ejected from the project.

FreeBSD's "core" has the devrel role, and has also been accused of
similar lack of transparency. Two high-visibility ejections are further
detailed below.

Debian:
In 2006, came the conclusion of the Debian events with "krooger" (Ted
Walther / Jonathan Walther). I met him in 2004, as part of a keysigning
event. His Debian Project Leader election platforms of 2005 & 2006 are
notable reading [including the proposal to reform Debian's New
Maintainer process, by requiring active developers renew-by-retesting].
In the DPL 2005 election, he was the first person to ever rank below
"None of the above", which says a lot about how he was viewed by other
Debian Maintainers.

I met him again, via social circles, a few years ago, and at the time,
he was still sure there was a long-term grudge against him, from
inflammatory remarks he made in in the early 2000s, which he felt
contributed to his in-person expulsion from Debian during DebConf06 (the
expulsion message was originally posted to debian-private, but leaked
onto the internet).  After the expulsion, he left tech for a few years
(studied non-tech things), had a small tech business, followed other
non-tech business.

Debian does have some cleaner developer removals as well: krooger
mentioned two of them [1], because somebody asked him during the DPL
election about who he'd eject from Debian. The other one that I'm aware
of, is Lars Wirzenius (liw), who admitted [2] that he was kicked out of
Debian for insulting somebody, and later re-admitted.

FreeBSD:
In 2003, Dillon was kicked out FreeBSD, and the public postings [3]
about it noted his "interdeveloper relation skills". FreeBSD at the time
had "The FreeBSD Committers' Big List of Rules" [4], which while not
explicitly labeled as a Code of Conduct in themselves, were already
referred to as such, and do explicitly mention penalties. (P.S. Dillon
forked FreeBSD after being kicked out).

Much more recently, you can look at FreeBSD & Randi Harper, wherein
FreeBSD gained an explicit CoC, and various legal remarks were made
usage of the FreeBSD trademark. Publicly messy event, but key decisions
by FreeBSD core were still not made transparently.

[1] http://debian.2.n7.nabble.com/Candidate-questions-expulsions-process-tp2329145p2329158.html
[2] http://blog.liw.fi/posts/dd20/
[3] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=5219480&sid=52722&tid=7
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20031214041942/http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/rules.html

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Dev, Infra Lead, Foundation Trustee & Treasurer
E-Mail   : robbat2@g.o
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