Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > linux.debian.project > #12912

Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community?

Show all headers | View raw

On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 06:37:03AM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
>The difficult cost of trying to have a voice as a Debian user is *not* the commitment, it
>is enduring the ad hominem attacks when I express my opinion. Of course if I cannot
>overcome the stigma of the ad hominem attacks, my voice is completely nullified
>by those ad hominem attacks. And they continue. Michael Stone followed me to
>this list and condemned for me asking questions here on this list. There is no way
>*he* considers me a member of the Debian community who has a formal voice as
>a Debian user. 

Since you've been complaining about how people react to your messages 
for quite some time, perhaps you might change the way you write your 
messages?

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994899#5

When people give you negative feedback, you announce that they are 
"attacking" or "defaming" you.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/09/msg00785.html

And the pattern continues with new messages periodically complaining
about debian, followed by "oh, I understand now" type messages, then the
same complaints get recycled again later.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/08/msg00370.html

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/09/msg00267.html

There are a lot of walls of text that just don't seem to ever lead
anywhere. In the message I'm replying to you wrote 90+ lines, took the 
time to call me out for "attacking" you, asked some rhetorical 
questions, but never explained a particular problem that debian might be 
able to address. You want other people to read volumes but show no sign 
of changing based on the feedback you get, repeatedly complaining about 
'bugs not being fixed' without mentioning what bugs so people could 
actually engage with you on why a particular bug might not have been 
fixed. (You did it yet again in the message I'm replying to--after 
specifically stating at the start of this thread that your last thread 
on the topic degenerated so you were going to switch lists and focus on 
something different!) I can't see how we can possibly improve your 
experience with debian until you stop the long meta-discussions about 
vague concerns and find a way to clearly communicate what problems we 
might help you to fix. If you want better results, keep your 
communications direct and actionable.

In fact, this is basically what you were told a year ago in one of the 
threads where you complained that you were being attacked:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994899#10

"You've filed a new bug so make the exact problem the primary part of 
this bug. Don't ask of others to read a '50 page document' and expect 
them to distill YOUR problem themselves. Doing a copy+paste of the 
*relevant* part is absolutely fine."

You have now sent a message about a particular udev issue to debian-user 
and I replied with one immediate thought. Some more thoughts: you're 
using a fairly obscure configuration. Most people running interactive 
VMs (e.g., on a desktop with a graphical console) aren't using Xen, 
they're using kvm or virtualbox or just about anything else. People 
running Xen are much more likely to use something like debootstrap 
rather than going through an installer. So the number of people who 1) 
can duplicate the problem and 2) are likely to do so, is pretty small. 
The reality is that this will affect how much attention the problem 
gets. As mentioned several times, by several people, you have a tendancy 
to write enormous volumes of text. Just reading the logs of the bugs 
associated with your issue was exhausting. There are no concise 
summaries, there are no small patches to help identify/isolate an issue. 
(There is, for example, a 1700 line patch in 994899 which basically 
reverts an entire set of functionality; maintainers generally prefer 
minimal and well understood changes. The eventual fix from upstream 
corrected several issues but didn't rip out all the associated 
functionality to do so.) It's not enough to say that something like that 
fixes a problem for you, unless it's clear what the effect would be on 
the set of people whose systems are currently working but who might be 
negatively affected by the change. For your udev problem I would 
probably focus on why the runtime behavior is different than the 
installer behavior, and try to make the installer behave like the 
runtime. (Runtime doesn't require kernel patches, etc., so it seems 
unlikely those are necessary to fix the problem.) If you can isolate 
that to something you can express clearly and produce a patch to correct 
you'll probably get a positive response. If you continue to send massive 
volumes of roundabout reports, then complain that you aren't getting 
enough attention, it's much less likely that anyone will choose to spend 
time working with you on this.

Back to linux.debian.project | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> - 2022-09-14 23:00 +0200
  Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? Clément Hermann <nodens@debian.org> - 2022-09-15 13:40 +0200
  Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2022-09-15 17:40 +0200
  Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2022-09-16 16:30 +0200
    Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2022-09-16 22:00 +0200
    Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> - 2022-09-17 05:50 +0200
      Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community? Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2022-09-17 16:30 +0200

csiph-web