Tiago Bortoletto Vaz <tiago@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I'm curious to know what's the project's view here. I've followed more
> or less all that and as someone (sort of) close do Daniel I couldn't
> have a strong opinion so far. It's clear to me that there're some people
> inside Debian who are still confused, while others have explicitly
> stated that Iain (or the whole debian-cd team) attitude was both
> socially harmfull and technically wrong. But, my impression here in
> private is that we're reducing the problem on 'external users who don't
> know a bit of what's really going on' vs 'internal members who're the
> reasonable voices because they know something that those users are not
> aware of'. If it's the case, Debian is doing a disservice for the
> community on hiding the real issue. And even worst by trying to fix an
> old internal war in such a terrible manner.
Apologies. It's been clear from various responses since my last message
that the history here isn't well-known even to a lot of Debian Developers.
It may be because the origins of it go so far back. If I remember
correctly, there were already tensions about Daniel's work in Debian
around the time of the first DebConf I attended in 2007.
I think all of the previous discussion has been on debian-private, so I
can't easily point you at the archived previous discussions and
information. (Someone can probably dig appropriate references out of the
debian-private archive.) The short version is that there have been
seemingly endlessly repeated low-grade conflicts between Daniel and other
Debian core teams dating back multiple years, mostly around the quality
and timing of his work and his communication (or lack thereof) with the
rest of the project. A lot of people tried for a long time to resolve
those problems, but (at least from my perspective) Daniel was not willing
to substantially change the things he was doing that were causing
conflicts with other people's projects and work.
That culminated a while back in Daniel officially leaving the project, and
then coming back a while later as a non-voting Debian Maintainer in a move
that I still don't think was a good idea for either Daniel or the project.
It's been a really frustrating situation for a very long time, since
Daniel has also done a *ton* for Debian, and he's generally not obnoxious,
confrontational, or otherwise apparently the sort of contributor who would
cause any tensions. It kept feeling like the sort of situation that we
could somehow work out, but there was, from my outsider perspective, just
never any forward progress or improvement.
The DAM was a lot more involved and could probably provide more
information. I think everyone is reluctant to provide a lot of specifics
because either we were mostly on the sidelines and don't know the entirety
of any one incident (for example, I can only comment in any depth on the
one that came up in the tech-ctte, which wasn't particularly serious by
itself), or don't want to air a bunch of dirty laundry because Daniel is
in general a genuinely nice person that we all want to like.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@xxxxxxxxxx) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
|
|
