Bug#836246: Acknowledgement (libgtk-3-0: Upgrade from 3.20.9 to 3.21.5 broke Mate desktop)

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 10/06/2016 12:52 AM, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
>> I'm a bit shocked to be honest how much I'm being prosecuted down for
>> this! We should really start wondering where the code of conduct
>> ends and the censorship and the paternalism starts.
>>
> 
> My intention was not to make you feel prosecuted. I am sorry if you
> feel it that way.

No worries. I was just surprised that this was picked up again after
Laura already spoke to me. She had sent me a mail and I had a discussion
with her and that's it. I didn't expect this to come up again.

>> Again, I did not attack anyone directly, I was swearing in public
>> and I think this is something which is covered by freedom of speech.
>>
> 
> I believe that your original message did hurt some people, even if it
> wasn't directed towards anybody specifically. So freedom of speech is
> guaranteed as long as nobody feels attacked, hurt or shocked. And, CoC
> is not meant to censor anyone. It is a tool to ensure that we interact
> in a pleasant and welcoming environment, for the maximum of people.

Well, if someone wants to get hurt they will be hurt. You can't really
prevent that from happening. There have been some unfortunate developments
in society in this regards where people are over-sensitizing and reacting
offended to even the tiniest lack of courtesy and honestly, I find that
disturbing.

We are all humans and therefore we can be moody, annoyed and stressed
out. And swearing is just a means of venting and a very legitimate
one I find. I rather prefer people swearing than building up their
anger and then loosing their minds completely.

And I remember the discussions when the CoC was established and back
then some people where so overly sensitive that even the old figure
of speech about tarring and feathering someone offended them as they
interpreted that sentence as actual threat of violence against themselves
which is, of course, ridiculous.

So, while I agree we should keep things on a professional level, I would
also like to emphasize that Debian is a project run by humans and not
emotionless robots meaning that all the previous statements from above
regarding stress, emotions and moodiness apply.

>> I'm not going to comment further on this. I'm also no longer subscribed
>> to the pkg-mate-team mailing list and I will most likely also leave
>> the team because I honestly didn't just feel annoyed but outright
>> harassed by those people you abuse the Debian bug tracker as their
>> personal support ticket system. Those aren't just lapses and oversights,
>> this is outright laziness and malicious entitlement by those people.
>>
> 
> We are not forced to reply to every bug. We have also ways to ensure that
> specific people are banned from interacting with the BTS and mailing lists
> if we show they have a malicious behavior, by contacting BTS admins and
> listmasters. We all feel the same when some minority abuses some system.
> Some maintainers know better how to deal with those. I believe it is better
> to ignore those abusers instead of swearing.

Well, the primary problem that we have - from my personal experience - is
the fact that the Debian BTS is just too freely accessible. It has become
so outright easy to report a bug that most users can't even be bothered
to go through support channels like IRC or mailing list first. They run into
a small problem, don't even bother to do some initial testing themselves
to be able to exclude common mistakes and the first thing they do is
go to the bug tracker and file a bug.

While you are right that we don't have to reply to every bug, you also
have to keep in mind that we are actually still interested in valid bug
reports because they are also a means for us maintainers to keep an
overview over existing issues. For example, for the sparc64 port, we're
reporting every architecture-related issue, tag it with the "sparc64"
and are therefore always able to see what the remaining, unresolved issues
are which is an important tool when working on a project over a long
time.

Now, when people like the initial reporter of this bug report start
flooding us with redundant or invalid bug reports, they add lots of
noise into the bug tracking and effectively hamper our work up to
a point where it gets outright annoying and almost harassing. Again,
I do not have a problem with valid bug reports. But I expect everyone
who files a bug to have at least the courtesy to do some research
first before filing a bug report, especially when using the development
versions of Debian where constant breakage is to be expected. Filing
a bug report should always be the last measure when dealing with a
problem, not the first one. It's a bug tracker after all, not a ticket
system from IT support.

I therefore really wished that we start locking down the bug tracker
like other projects do. It would be a big improvement if reporters
had to go through some sort of account system first. This will not
just reduce the number of bugs reports which were filed out of laziness
but also effectively solve the problem we have with SPAM mail closing
bug reports by sending mail to nnnnnn-done at b.d.o.

Thanks,
Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913