How to not collaborate with Debian (and upstream)

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:35:19 -0400 "Steven Harms" 
<thisdyingdream at gmail.com> wrote:
>This sounds more like 'How not to encourage anyone to help at all'.
>The tone of the comments
>in the bug are very confrontational when clearly all these people
>wanted was a functional
>package.
>
>They saw a package that didn't work for *anyone* and wanted to change
>it.  They were not
>seasoned pro's, and I think this is just a testimate to the lack of a
>obvious process.
>
>It would be a shame, on the heels of developer week, to lambaste new
>contributors on
>mailing lists.

So it's better to stay silent in the face of a bad technical decision 
(leaving the inter-distro/inter-project frictions aside even)?  Gems, as 
has been the subject of recent discussion on Ubuntu ML about why this was 
NOT a good idea, pretty thoroughly ignore the entire package management 
systems.  Putting them in the path so random versions not installed by the 
package management system get executed in the place of system installed 
version is not my idea of a good plan.

Also, Lucas is speaking as a Debian developer and he's really not under any 
obligation to worry about our social calendar.  The best way to avoid this 
kind of backblast is to work out sensible solutions with Debian and 
upstream.

Scott K