How to not collaborate with Debian (and upstream)

[Stephan Hermann]

Good Morning,

On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 20:35 -0400, Steven Harms 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.

Well, I made this mistake with ruby1.9 in the past, and Lucas and I were
discussing it, and somehow we came over that.
The problem with a change inside this package, speak: "We changed
something really serious, which has a "gem" in the name" is really not
trivial. 

Even if you think your fix is a good one, and helps your people, but it
won't help the common situation in general. 

There needs to be a talk...and when I recall my inbox, there was a lot
of talk because of this crap named gem.

> It would be a shame, on the heels of developer week, to lambaste new
> contributors on
> mailing lists.

TBH, ruby is a very strange thing...and imho it would have been better
to include Lucas in this discussion and finding with him a good solution
which suites all, not only ubuntu. The problem with gem is not ubunut
specific, and we need to come to a good solution with upstream + all
downstreams.

Lucas reply to this issue was very sarcastic, but nevertheless regarding
this issue, he was right.

Regards,

\sh
-- 
Stephan '\sh' Hermann           | OSS Developer & Systemadministrator
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