Alec Warner posted on Wed, 21 Mar 2018 10:44:48 -0400 as excerpted: > On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 1:36 AM, Eray Aslan <e...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 10:28:48AM -0500, Matthew Thode wrote: >> > While I personally do no agree with mailing list moderation infra has >> > been tasked with moving forward on it. >> >> You can always resign from infra. >> >> >> That was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment but not wholly. You cant >> cop out by saying it was an order from council. I understand if you >> dont but do consider it. Fight the good fight. >> >> > So when there is conflict its pretty often that you have 3 options. > > 1) Accept 2) Leave 3) Escalate
Wise words. Here the context was/is infra, but they apply to general devs and users who disagree with this as well, thus my own personal interest, altho I'm not so much a "disagree" as a "concerned and sad it has to come to this", as I see both sides. [Note: I intend this to be my only post to this thread, unless a reply calls for further reply on my part. It's my position of record on the moderation/whitelisting and may also be my last to the list before it goes moderated. If that's not of interest to you I'd rather you skip the rest of the post and use the time for something you consider more constructive. =:^) ] > I'm not sure 3 is possible (the council is already the highest body). I > also think that as a organization this is how we arranged it to be. Astute observation. > Speaking for myself, this is not the worst issue I've seen in Gentoo and > so I thing doing 2 is probably not very effective. Its also likely I can > only do 2 once (because maybe I would not be welcome'd back or want to > contribute anymore.) Also astute. I'm ignoring my urge to point to "real world" examples as this list is *definitely* not the place, but in the safer general realm it can simply be observed that there's /always/ a leave/stay-and-accept (if only temporarily/strategically) argument to be made, even in the /worst/ cases (which must here be left to imagination and history) where arguably "leave" is the only morally acceptable alternative. Fortunately, I believe most will agree this isn't a "worst" case in that regard, tho it may be bad enough that some find they must leave. But for both users and devs there remain the practical questions: Where else would I go? Is that alternative actually practically viable? Would I be more effective there than here, hoping to eventually reverse the decision (or for those like me more on the sad-it-came-to-this-but-I- see-why-some-believe-it-has side, hoping a short trial is demonstration enough of capacity and that it lowers the threat to where even those that agree it has to come to that now feel comfortable in reverting it, tho possibly retaining the capacity to reimpliment if necessary)? In practice, there are certainly from-source alternatives. However, again practically, gentoo does seem to be the biggest, and most others seem to either be mostly-compatible offshoots such as funtoo and exherbo that to some degree still depend on the larger gentoo tree and community, or to make choices that put them to one side or the other of gentoo's "automated/scripted from-source" approach (arch's core-binary approach on the toward-binaries side, and lfs/linux-from-scratch's much more manual- but-still-guided, approach on the other). There's also the very practical "but I already know and am familiar with gentoo and how it works (both technically and socially) and would have to learn the others" factor. For both those reasons and I suppose others, gentooers who have been around a few years, at least long enough to develop that familiarity, tend to stay around as long as they remain interested in gentoo's general automated-from-source approach (tho many ultimately lose that interest and go binary-distro or leave the FLOSS community entirely), unless of course forced out as incompatible with continuing community interest, in which case, given little choice, they often land at one of those alternatives. > That leaves 1 and one interests me for many reasons. > > a) as noted earlier, decisions are not set in stone. Its possible we > could turn on this whitelisting solution for a brief period and the > decision is overturned at the next council meeting, or perhaps at the > next council election once the existing council is replaced. Agreed. I've already mentioned what I believe would be my ideal outcome, above. Try the whitelisting as proposed for awhile, then having demonstrated the capacity/threat, relax things, while maintaining the capacity, such that hopefully the toxic people that created the initial need will not find it worth their while to be toxic here once again, but with the capacity to reinstitute should they do so. (Yes, I know that unused tools fall into disrepair over time, but often, repair, or even redo if necessary, is easier the second time around. So hopefully the capacity would remain available or at least easier to implement again, if again needed.) (Points B and C omitted as infra specific, because I've nothing to add.) > d) Infra as a organization wields a lot of power in Gentoo and I think > its organizationally dangerous to wield that power in this way. [...] > e) In the past, infra *has* wielded its power in a fashion that had > negative impacts on the distribution (e.g. arbitrarily removing commit > rights for developers with no warning, process, or oversight). Having lived thru much of that, I 100% agree that it's not something gentoo should ever want to go back to. While individuals are certainly free to resign should they feel the need, having even infra subject to an _elected_ council is a _good_ thing! Meanwhile, I've already stated my position. I'm sad to see it come to this, and hope it to be eventually reversed, but the elected council has spoken, I understand the events that lead to their decision, and remain and abide is my chosen option. And as for the effect on my own posts as a non-dev, personally... * My posting intent on any list, including this one, is positive contribution. Should I ever believe my posts have ceased to be that, I'll immediately apologize if it was one-off/short-term, or stop posting if I don't believe my posts to be a positive contribution going forward. (I've often spent quite some time composing a post, only to ultimately close the window without sending, because on consideration before hitting send, I decided it wasn't unquestionably a positive contribution to the list/discussion in question. Sometimes just writing it for me was what I needed to do. Sometimes I simply thought better of it, period.) * I'm acutely mindful of the fact that this _is_ gentoo-*dev*, and that as a user, not a dev, I'm but a guest here. (And yes, that sometimes influences my "don't send it after all" decision.) * While there are complaints of my verbosity, I've never been /banned/ and I'm proud of that. * I've had personal offers to whitelist, for which I am grateful. (The given reason was that while I'm often too wordy, I often do have a valid point/question, that may not have been brought up by others. I do struggle with the wordiness, believe me, but I'm grateful that at least some devs consider my posts a positive enough contribution to extend the whitelisting offer.) * For the time being, I've thanked, but turned down that whitelisting offer. When I'd otherwise post, I'm going to take the opportunity to reconsider the positive contribution of my posts even more, try again to whittle down the wordiness further, and then, if I still consider it worth the effort, I'm going to forward the post to the person I'm replying to or possibly to someone else (like the person who offered the whitelisting), asking them to forward it... but *only* if they too consider it a positive contribution to the current discussion. Tho I may eventually request whitelisting, in the mean time I intend to learn what I can from the forward/rejection/rejection-with-feedback on those attempted contributions, to try to make future attempted contributions even better! =:^) That's keeping in mind that as a user not a dev, I /do/ consider myself a guest on this list, and arguably, posting to it has /always/ been a privilege, not a right. And given the coming whitelisting, devs, thru their elected council, have clearly expressed their desire to cut down the outside noise from "guests", ensuring that any such "guest posts" allowed thru are signal, not noise, or worse yet, negative signal. As one of those guests, abiding by that expressed intent to the best of my ability is my goal, and I intend to take the presented opportunity to try to improve my own attempts at contribution! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
