Marc Haber <mh+debian-proj...@zugschlus.de> writes: > But please don't forget that a person vanishing from a heated discussion > just in a whim creates the feeling of victory in the orht discussion > parties.
> And I KNOW what I would do as participant of a heated discussion after > receiving a DAM warning. I think the way you've framed this captures a lot of what we're struggling with right now. Why is victory a desired outcome in discussions? Why is victory something we're trying to prevent other people from feeling? (And this is not just you, to be clear; I completely recognize the feeling that you're describing.) How have we managed to make vanishing from a heated discussion a bad thing? Shouldn't it be good to back away from something that's too heated and let it calm down? Part of the problem you're getting at, I think, is that we feel like we've lost the capacity for constructive discussion in some areas, and the options are either to win a heated discussion or to vanish. This is a very bad place to be. That's a sign of an unhealthy community and an unhealthy project, and Debian is not going to survive if that's where we stay. My goal is to have non-heated discussions and a clear decision-making process. If *everyone* stepped away from heated discussions, the heated discussions would end, and that would be great. What I think you're identifying is the worry that one side is going to "win" by default, and to me the answer to that is to end the heated discussion, but not the *discussion*. To ensure there is some explicit decision point that you will not miss by leaving the uncomfortable and draining discussion that has gotten too heated. There are some decisions (although I hope not very many!) where we have a fundamental disagreement over the path forward and still have to decide, and some group is going to feel like the project is going in the wrong direction. We should try to minimize those, but they exist. But that still doesn't mean we need to have a heated discussion. We can identify the core points of disagreement, try to narrow them down as much as possible, and resort to a vote. That's why I care so much about GR process; it gives us a way to make a decision that doesn't involve one group of people yelling down another group of people until they achieve some sort of victory. I think those victories are pyrrhic. Sometimes I'm going to be in the minority in the project on something that matters to me and I'll have to decide whether to live with that or whether that means Debian is no longer aligned with my goals. That's hard to deal with, but at least if it comes in the form of a clear vote, I'll have concrete facts to work with. It can't come in the form of people willing mailing list arguments by attrition, since then I'll never be convinced that I really was in the minority as opposed to just being unwilling to shout loud enough. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
