On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 9:03 PM, Elena ``of Valhalla'' valhalla-l@trueelena.org wrote:
I say seemed, however, because at least in the worst cases the pattern of behaviour were more suggestive of a troll trying to stir up controversy for its own sake (or for some other reason) rather than somebody honestly concerned with systemd, and that surely helped muddle things further.
yyeah this is the most unfortunate / fortunate aspect of what happened. a massive proportion of people in the software libre community (particularly debian) knew that something felt... wrong... but were completely ill-equipped to *both* identify it *and* express it.
where the primary focus was on engineering, where you *absolutely must* be capable of expressing precisely and exactly what is wrong, a "this doesn't feel right" feeling would *of course* be outright rejected with "please provide evidence / proof".
not only that but people would have felt totally uncomfortable expressing their true views and feelings (even if they truly had a way to express them without causing upset / offense / whatever). "i feel totally betrayed by your democratic majority-vote-style decision [which e.g. forces me to spend hundreds of hours converting live-running systems to a new distro]" is not something that can be bug-fixed.
so yes, the end-result, elena, would have been what you witnessed.
why describe this as "fortunate"? because it identifies a flaw within the software libre community that, one might hope, everyone can learn from.
l.