Re: Who didn't respect privacy?

[Richard Jones <richard@a42.deep-thought.org>]

Bruce Perens wrote:
> From: Richard Jones <richard@a42.deep-thought.org>
> > The line "in preperation for certain parties spilling onto net news" reeks of 
> > pure paranoia to me, and is an indication that Joey et al. are justified in 
> > attributing machiavellian intentions to you.
> 
> You think that's not going to happen? 

   Well yes, I did think it might not happen, but now it has, do you mind 
iterating what you were hoping to gain from posting to news other than a 
"pre-emptive" strike.

> I'd be happy to make a bet with you
> just so that you'd watch the outcome. I sincerely hope you win such a bet.
> The situation seems too inflamatory to me - we're going to spin off people,
> as we already have, and those people will talk. How could they not?
> 

   Sounds like you may have initiated a self-fulfilling prophecy, now the 
thread is started I imagine it will continue (comp.os.linux.misc is not one of 
the groups I usually read, so I'm not sure what response your post has 
received yet).


> One of the problems of a distribution with close to 200 participants is
> that there are a good many members who pop up once in a while and you
> don't know who they are. In this case I know that you are the
> maintainer of the anagram generator and that's about all I know. I
> don't mean to offend, but I'm not sure how I should count your opinion.
> I think that's part of the problem. The "good old days" of the project
> were those when the developer count was between 60 and 100. We had
> arguments then, and people left, but there was no question what
> direction we were going in.  With 150 package maintainers and something
> like 200 participants, it's impossible to have a coherent direction for
> the entire group, and the governing body is reduced to finding the
> _vector_sum_ of the membership.
> 

Its also impossible to run an entire group when one vector has by far the 
largest magnitude, if that vector deviates in direction greatly from the other 
"little" vectors disatisfaction will occur.

> Regarding your support or lack thereof, should I feel bad that I don't have
> it? I have the support of the creator of Debian and many of the best
> developers, though certainly not all of them.

Hmmm, making value judgements such as "Best developers", seems a little askew 
to me, and basing how much weight you give their opinions even more so.  To 
abuse an analogy, if the maintainer of glibc told you to sell Debian to 
microsoft, but the maintainer of the crappy anagram generator thought this was 
a bad idea, the glibc maintainer being of greater merit would be given more 
weight irrespective of cogency of his argument?  What I'm saying is that at 
this point "Best/worst/most prolific/least prolific" labels for developers 
seem less important than what type of sense they are making.  IMO posting 
internal debian disputes to external public newsgroups is a decision making 
little sense.

> I could take a number of them
> off elsewhere to continue the system with a smaller team in the spirit of the
> earlier times of the project. That would be bad for "Big Debian", but I'm not
> sure it would be bad for Debian.
> 

> More and more I wonder if it's possible, or even desirable, to keep 200
> people happy and moving in one direction in a project like ours. The
> coherence of the developer vote will tell me a lot about that.
> 
> 	Thanks
> 
> 	Bruce

Yup, the vote will be interesting, I would guess your point of view will 
receive majority support, and that such developer loyalty has been earnt out 
of your excellent past services to Debian, however I think recent moves by you 
have been ill advised to say the least.