On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 11:07:32AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
The best way to ensure that someone new gets appropriate attention and encouragement is for someone to volunteer to be a mentor and commit some time to that. I think this is great whenever people are willing to do it. I don't have the free time, and I did *not* volunteer to do that, so people need to adjust their expectations accordingly.
I am also unhappy with Otto's regular attempts to set _my_ priorities. I expect to see things like "Priority: <name of task>" in a message from a manager to an employee. I do _not_ expect to see them in a broadcast from a volunteer to a list full of other volunteers. We can ask other people to do things, and of course people do that all the time when they're announcing new features or trying to make change happen or whatever, but we can't unilaterally declare things to be other people's priorities.
Every time this sort of thing comes up, Otto immediately walks it back and says that that isn't really what he meant. I believe that he intends good things for Debian and is just kind of bad at remembering that other people can productively do things in different ways. But it's getting hard to keep that in mind when it happens over and over again.
Perhaps Otto should manage his draft emails in a repository on Salsa, and seek review of them before sending them? (I acknowledge that this is somewhat snarky, but it is also semi-serious; I've seen that improve how well-meaning people with otherwise controversial communication styles come across.)
-- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
