Clint Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 02:07:36PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> If you're out to improve the world and get it rid of all social >> unfairnesses, I suggest you find yourself another project. > Now there's a shitty thing to say. Anything else would be simply inaccurate. What do you expect? Do you tell people that breaking up with their partners is a shitty thing to do? Lots of breakups are unfair. They happen anyway. Some of them come complete with the horrified and offended ex who can't understand why the relationship fell apart and who can't believe how horribly unfair the breakup was, and keeps hanging around, convinced that one day you'll realize just how badly you treated them and then everything will be wonderful again. Often they're wonderfully decent human beings -- after all, that's why the relationship started in the first place. Those are sometimes the ones that make you feel like crap. You still don't get back together, and if you do, it's inevitably a horrible mistake. It was a failure of social interaction. Last time I checked, we're still humans, with all the associated baggage and standard problems. If you have some solution to falling outs between friendships, communities, and relationships that allows them all to be resolved fairly, you should quit your job and start writing self-help books, because you'd be richer than Bill Gates. Debian is not a social experiment in conflict-free problem resolution. It's a project for creating a free operating system. Tackle one hard problem at a time. In the meantime, use the best techniques you can in other problem areas, realize that it's not an area of expertise and occasionally it's going to be more broken than it needs to be, and don't spend the rest of time revisiting decisions over and over. At some point, you have to say enough is enough, walk away from the mess, and move on. Poking at it forever doesn't make it better. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
