[ANNOUNCE] dh_splitpackage 0.1

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello everybody,

Am 04.06.2011 05:00, schrieb Scott Kitterman:
> I fail to find any evidence in Evan's reply that he thought otherwise.  I find 
> it quite odd that you are so certain of it.  It may not be clear to you, but 
> Ubuntu and Canonical are not at all the same thing.  

AFAIK Zygmunt contributed to Ubuntu since 2005 and was only hired into
Canonical some time last year. I'm quite sure he's well aware what
Canonical is and what Ubuntu is.


> My impression is that for that to be possible it probably needs a different 
> author.  You don't appear to have any interest in collaboration to improve 
> things for the greater benefit.  I see you've had some involvement in Ubuntu 
> for some time and are an Ubuntu Member, so I think you should know you are not 
> working with people the way we try to do in Ubuntu.  When I read your initial 
> message I thought it sounded interesting.  I'm not interested anymore.

The message this sends out is "if you don't go the whole nine yards,
you're not with us", which I don't agree with.

In a lot of cases in the open source world somebody proposed a solution
to part of a bigger problem and even if they chose not to completely
generalise it, upstream it, etc., it helped others to pave the way for a
more general solution. It would be great if all proposed changes in the
world landed upstream first and in a general way, but I don't think it's
a fair a priori expectation.

This exchange does not only alienate Zygmunt, but also future
contributors who happen to read this. Everybody is entitled to be of the
opinion that solutions are worthless if they don't generally fix all the
related bugs, but you don't speak for me.

Ubuntu is different because we invite people to share their ideas and we
welcome people in. Dismissing a helpful developer is unproductive and
more importantly actively damaging to the project.

Ironically enough it proves a point in Zygmunt's earlier message about
how hard it is to contribute to Debian/Ubuntu and this perception will stay.


> Fortunately your response to his helpful suggestion 
> has reduced the risk you'll ever be inconvenineced by such responses again.

6 emails into the thread, what have we achieved?

Positive:
 + a script shared that solves a specific problem,
 + some background on what would be necessary to fix the problem more
   generally and some info about what might be debhelper upstream's
   expectations.

Negative:
 - some confusion about email addresses,
 - a lasting impression that contributing to Debian and Ubuntu is hard
   and you might get flamed if you share your work but might be too
   busy to fully generalise it, etc etc.


Can we please go back to square 1 and can those who are interested in
the problems that are solved (or partly solved) by Zygmunt have a
conversation that is goal-oriented instead? I'm sure Zygmunt is happy to
answer questions about how his code works and which considerations
exactly led to it.

Thanks. Have a great day,
 Daniel

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