release team flambé
I've tried to start this blog entry about three times before, and just gave up, because when I try to describe all the things that are so badly wrong in the vast flaming thread that followed Steve's annoucement of the SCC proposal. Happily it turns out that others have kinda said it for me.
These temper tantrums have, as expected, clouded the perceptions of what could potentially be otherwise intelligent human beings. Apparently, people have forgotten how to read.
The number of people who are still posting flames to The Thread based on inferences they drew by skimming the head message is unbelivable.
I'm just.... amazed.... at how stupid the geek^Wnerd community is. Honestly. I doubt even half of them read the actual proposal, and of those who *did*, I doubt even half of them bothered to think beyond "OH NOES TEH SKY IS FALLING ON THE INTERNETS". Between conspiracy theories proposed by "Debian Developers" in the Slashdot comments (OH NOES THEY MET WITHOUT ME. CABAL! CABAL!), the cries to switch to NetBSD and the cries to switch to Gentoo, I just can't help but scratch my head.There were a few comments I wanted to reply to, but chose not to because, well, that would be silly of me. There's no getting through to any of them and I know that. It doesn't matter what the truth is, there will always be a better "cabal" or whiner story to offset reason.
And those who actually work to bring about some form of productivity or accomplishment will always be in the crosshairs of those who prefer to stomp feet and demand they be given equal say without equal amounts of work.
If the knee-jerk reaction results in causing pain to those close to our important teams; can we actually expect 100% that those members won't be tempted to throw in the towel in order to protect the ones that they love? For goodness sake people -- get a grip.
Anyway, I could go on, but I have had an epiphany. I'm pretty sure that my overall experience with Debian will turn out to have been divided into at least three distinct stages. Stage one began with my initial exposure and beginning to learn about Debian, and ended when I stopped just making the changes I wanted and looked outside my own packages at the larger project (think packaging games, writing debhelper, alien, etc). Stage two mostly involved me doing larger and more ambitious things that required getting the whole project to change (debconf, policy, starting d-i, maybe testing-security, etc). Stage three will be when I've given up on that and am just coasting along on loose ends before my exit. In retrospect, stage 3 may have began about 1.5 years ago, though if it has, I still seem to have about 5 years worth of loose ends in front of me.