Joachim Breitner <nomeata@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I would love to see someone official – possibly the Debian Leader, or a
> well-respected project member volunteering for this job – to stand up,
> publicly state that something went wrong, and then, as a neutral
> moderator, talks to both sides involved in the process, tries to figure
> out what precisely happened, and eventually (though hopefully not in too
> long) writes to an appropriate list a report on the issue, including
> conclusions about how to prevent such a mess in the future.
This is a very difficult situation because many of the reasons why
Daniel's relationship with the project have not been good are
long-standing issues that the project addressed in various ways, in some
cases years ago. The relationship here has been troubled for quite some
time, but the various people involved have (I think with mostly thoughtful
restraint) have not repeatedly raised them. Therefore, a lot of people
who saw that thread have no idea the full history of what's going on here
and say things like that Daniel was attacked for no reason. Which,
whatever one might think about the past issues, is not correct.
I'm very proud of a lot of people for not jumping into that thread and
defending themselves and arguing with the characterizations presented
there. This is quite a significant improvement over the way I think this
would have played out even five years ago, and while it's very hard to
stand aside and see angry things being said without full context, I think
that's been wise.
The main question here is how much we want to raise a bunch of old
tensions in order to make a public statement in response here. I'm a bit
dubious that it's going to do much good, and whether an extended public
discussion of who is right and who is wrong will actually accomplish
anything.
I think the chances of a reconciliation between Daniel and the project are
very remote for a lot of reasons, and this resigniation (of sorts) is
something I'm actually surprised didn't happen some years ago. So in that
sense I don't think there will be a successful mediation. The question is
whether there's enough to be gained by a public report to be worth the
extended public discussion, which is likely to be rather acrimonious.
My personal feeling is to thank Daniel for all of his hard work over the
years for the probject and wish him luck with all of his future endeavors
and just leave it at that. We'll take a fair bit of bad publicity for a
while from people not aware of the history, and then it will blow over.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxx) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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