inamerrata

So following Florian’s chastisement of my “threatening” fellow Debian developers, Charles Plessy becomes annoyed by a bug in apt-file (its default configuration expects curl, but wget is what’s installed on most systems), at which point Luk Claes then starts threatening to NMU whether the maintainer likes it or not. Naturally that’s not the correct thing to do for a report the maintainer’s addressed and said is not a bug, 0-day NMU policy or not. Naturally, pointing this out brings Charles back into the fray, to complain further. A followup to that produces this off-list reply from Charles:

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote :
> I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If
> you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU.

Dear Anthony,

I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that
more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope
Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs.

> In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if
> you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing,
> rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences.

> Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool...

That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks.
They poison the -devel list.

Best,

So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag.

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’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).

UPDATE 2006/02/06:

A random response here (the poster of which then sent me a personal email the next day), and exciting new developments here.