Re: [gentoo-user] Hard to find netiquette, enculturation bug. (Was: Re: [gentoo-user] GNOME: Cant logout and Lock Screen is showing different background from GNOME screensaver)

[Willie Wong]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:03:36PM +0800, Penguin Lover Mark David Dumlao squawked:
> Pompous ass? Personal Vendetta? Pissed off? What world is this?
>
> One bug report is just an announcement that there is a problem. It
> might seem to you that people get on a high horse when they say that,
> but a lot of us like solving problems. It's the first few reactions
> here that were too pompous for taste. Why, the OP was a _question_.

Yes, the OP was a question. And I well sympathize with you for the
first dozen exchanges here on the issue. I applaud you for filing a
bug on b.g.o., albeit in my personal opionion it should go under
"documentation" and not "userrel". 

But as the thread drags on, your stubborn defense against other posters
who request that you drop the subject already because
  *) the community here can't change anything on the gentoo website.
  You've already filed a bug. Why not just wait for it bear fruit?
  *) your vociferous complaints are sounding more and more like "you
  inconvenienced me, and I demand an apology" and less like "hey guys,
  here's a suggestion, why not let us do such and such". 
really does make you sound like someone with a grudge. I mean, 
(not that I agree with how those first responses to your post about 
the bug report were written) when people dismiss your complaints as 
a non-issue, and the best response you can come up with is that "I 
have been inconvenienced. I have no other data points but surely what 
happened to me have and will happen to others," you are not doing a 
good job convincing people of your case. For most technical bug
reports, one of the key issues is reproducibility: if something can be
reproduced by others, then it is a bug with the code; if something can
not be reproduced by anyone else, then it is most likely something on
your end that is broken. And lo! Even you own experience should've
told you that your HTML posts are unlikely to be the problem: a quick
search on gmane shows that of the roughly a dozen threads you have
started on this list, only three have gone unanswered: and they are
  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/195121
    about gnome-btdownload
  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/202853
    about gnome shortcuts for rhythmbox
and the current one. If anything, I would hardly blame HTML e-mail for
your problems. I don't know about you, if my posting history is any
like yours, my first working hypothesis would be that gentoo-user is a
lousy place to ask Gnome questions. 

Look here, I perfectly agree with you on the issue that you brought
up: I think there should be an FAQ/Netiquette page for the list. But
not for the same motivation as you: I believe your case is a freak
case; that most posts don't get ignored even if they are in HTML. I
believe an FAQ/Netiquette page can be a good idea, and your case
serves as a particularly unfortunate point of illustration. But to
generalize from your individual case to the whole of the mailing list,
and giving this opinion while admitting clearly that you do not read
most of the posts to the list, and claiming your own personal browsing
habit is the typical, and using these to argue that an FAQ is an
absolute necessity, these makes you sound like you have perhaps too
high an opinion of your own self. 

Your curt response to my post only confirms this belief of mine: you
obviously did not read my post carefully, and only skimmed it,
thinking the world is against you, and were immediately tripped up by
the deliberately incendiary keywords that I planted in the post. 

I try to offer an alternative explanation to why you may not have
received a response to your very original query; that we are not all
such big assholes you imagine us to be who immediately delete all HTML
e-mails. And there you go, somehow deducing from my post that I have
a disagreement with people who file bug reports. Go figure. 

Since you asked: welcome to the unwashed masses of the internet, where
yours truly will flame any and all who acts sillily. ;p

Anyway, I apologize for calling you a pompous ass just for the sake of
my little social experiment. But I hope you really consider what I
have said in these two posts. You really don't want to (whether
knowingly or unknowingly) put-off the old-timers on this list. They
are a wonderful source of information. 

Shalom, 

W
-- 
I don't approve of political jokes...
I've seen too many of them get elected.
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