As much as I'd love to see this thread die, I think the superficially reasonable (but actually quite ridiculous) suggestion of using killfiles should be addressed.
On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 01:41:42PM +0100, Jonas Meurer wrote: > On 17/03/2006 Lars Wirzenius wrote: > > pe, 2006-03-17 kello 14:46 +1100, Brian May kirjoitti: > > > Would the next step be to ban Sven from participating in our public > > > mailing lists? > > With the understanding that we're now not talking about Sven Luther but > > a hypothetical highly abusive person, I wish to ask Brian the following > > question: do you think there are any circumstances under which Debian > > should be able to ban people from participating in our public mailing > > lists? > even though i'm not asked here, my opinion is that this shouldn't be > possible. there are killfiles and other great ways to ignore individuals > that you don't want to know anything about. So Sven is going to continue to be used here as an illustrative example, not because I want to pick on Sven, but because I want to demonstrate the plausibility of the problem I'm talking about. Sven has alienated a number of developers on the d-i team while working as a part of that team, including both the current and previous d-i release managers. He has maligned at least two members of the release team. He has accused the ftpmasters of negligence in their handling of powerpc packages leading up to the d-i RC last year. He has strained working relationships with a number of members of the kernel team, in spite of being in an administrative position over the alioth project (a stated factor in at least one developer choosing not to re-join the kernel team), and with the kernel-package maintainer (who is also the Project Secretary and a member of the TC). He has soured many debian-legal participants towards him with his infamous crapflooding over the ocaml license issue. Do you really think that all of these people who have a hard time with Sven should killfile him and ignore him? Do you understand that having large numbers of people killfile an active developer that they're on a team with isn't going to eliminate the conflict, the most it will do is move it out of email? Can you appreciate that some of us are in positions such that killfiling developers is a bad idea? (Does anyone remember flamewars started over the mere suggestion that an ftpmaster would use a scoring system on their mailbox that caused certain flamy developers to be given low priority?) In general, I think that if we have to killfile our peers, that's a failure as a community. Of course, you could argue that expelling a developer is also a failure of community; I guess when you get right down to it, though, I'd rather see us acknowledge it when particular viewpoints or behaviors are incompatible with the wider community (up to and including expulsion if necessary), rather than letting such issues fester beneath the surface. FWIW, I have a fairly large killfile that's built up over the years; but I don't killfile fellow DD. My two conditions for killfiling are: - I'm reasonably certain they'll never write anything that's worth my time reading it, and - they're impotent enough that I don't have to worry about the consequences of ignoring them Well, every DD can upload to the archive, so there can certainly be consequences from ignoring any of them completely. :) > but when you start to expel, ban or otherwise censor people in an open > project, where would you draw the border? I have a hard time seeing this objection as anything more than a shameful use of rhetoric. I mean, isn't the obvious answer "when there are no longer developers in our midst that the DAM agrees should be kicked out"? Or, if we're talking about bans and "censoring": "when there is no longer a majority of developers who finds the speech/behavior destructive to the project"? I mean, we're not talking about "and then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out" here; we're talking about a community of your peers, who you apparently respected enough to become a part of, deciding that particular behaviors are not acceptable or that the DAM made a mistake when letting a particular developer into the project. Do you really think that's wrong? Are you genuinely afraid of mass developer purges, given how many DDs speak out (loudly... repeatedly... pointlessly...) at any hint of censorship? Why do we need to constantly discuss the appropriateness of *having* an expulsion procedure, when it's already specified that this is a power of the DAM? Is everybody really just that insecure about the possibility of a gang of developers holding a grudge and moving to have them expelled? > in the long term, expulsions make debian sick. Debian is *already* sick, where mailing list behavior is concerned. Expulsions aren't a pleasant way of trying to deal with that sickness, but I'm definitely not convinced that the expulsion procedure we have today would ever be a "cure worse than disease" by actually expelling people. (I think sloppy invocations of it -- like posting to d-d -- may be, but that's not a flaw of the procedure itself.) > the more expulsions happen, the more new expulsion requests will be made. > and sometime everybodys 'moral limit' will be reached. Er, please back up this extraordinary claim. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
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