On 01/22/2014 03:00 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > I don't want to appear rude, but when reading this entire mail all I see > is someone who has probably never had to do it for real. > > People are not machines. Volunteers really do not like having their > freely given time nullified and access removed because one person > thought it was deserved.
Well ... if these persons actively break things, and endanger others, *and* they don't respond to multiple verbal warnings/threats ... ... what would you do? Every workplace environment and most opensource projects have some mechanism to enforce sanity in such situations, so why not have it explicitly stated so that there's no one surprised when it triggers? > > Do you realise the message that is sent by denying someone access? You > are saying that person is not good enough to work on Gentoo. Do you > really want to send that message? Yes. And I have no problem being the Evil Guy who pulls the trigger, err, presses the enter key. You are saying that *any* contribution should be accepted just to not hurt someones feelings. Bad news: I don't care about feelings. I care about facts, and results. The *chance* that this happens is luckily small enough, but it does make sense to have an established protocol for such cases. Otherwise any action will be considered "overstepping the boundaries" and/or "breaking the rules", and then there's a huge (social) fallout that could have easily been avoided. Like the discussion we're having now, only amplified a lot. > > Vast wholescale breakage is very rare and not something you can base > policy on. Black swan events are more common than optimists pray for
