{"id":100,"date":"2006-01-13T21:40:29","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T11:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/?p=100"},"modified":"2006-01-13T21:40:29","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T11:40:29","slug":"yay-for-hatemail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/2006\/01\/13\/yay-for-hatemail","title":{"rendered":"Yay for hatemail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So following <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.debian.org\/debian-devel\/2006\/01\/msg00695.html\">Florian&#8217;s chastisement<\/a> of my &#8220;threatening&#8221; fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.debian.org\/debian-devel\/2006\/01\/msg00731.html\">annoyed<\/a> by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what&#8217;s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.debian.org\/debian-devel\/2006\/01\/msg00748.html\">threatening to NMU<\/a> whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that&#8217;s <b>not<\/b> the correct thing to do for a report the maintainer&#8217;s addressed and said is not a bug, 0-day NMU policy or not. Naturally, <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.debian.org\/debian-devel\/2006\/01\/msg00803.html\">pointing this out<\/a> brings Charles back into the fray, to complain further. A followup to that produces this off-list reply from Charles:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<pre>\nOn Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :\n&gt; I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If\n&gt; you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU.\n\nDear Anthony,\n\nI would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that\nmore energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope\nLuke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs.\n\n&gt; In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if\n&gt; you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,\n&gt; rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.\n\n&gt; Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...\n\nThat kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks.\nThey poison the -devel list.\n\nBest,\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>So yay for people who aren&#8217;t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don&#8217;t understand Debian&#8217;s processes, yet still think it&#8217;s great to pontificate about what Debian&#8217;s processes are, go on about how developers are &#8220;arrogant experts&#8221; and who think &#8220;punctuation is pretty cool&#8221; is a &#8220;poisonous ad hominem attack&#8221;. But what I hate most is people who think they&#8217;re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag.<\/p>\n<p>For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It&#8217;s really not complicated. It&#8217;s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).<\/p>\n<p><b>UPDATE 2006\/02\/06:<\/b><\/p>\n<p>A random response <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.windfluechter.net\/?q=node\/75\">here<\/a> (the poster of which then sent me a personal email the next day), and exciting new developments <a href=\"http:\/\/azure.humbug.org.au\/~aj\/blog\/2006\/02\/06#2006-02-06-charlesplessy\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So following Florian&#8217;s chastisement of my &#8220;threatening&#8221; fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what&#8217;s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that&#8217;s not the correct thing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erisian.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}