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Debian switching to EGLIBCDebian switching to EGLIBCPosted May 7, 2009 10:51 UTC (Thu) by lmb (subscriber, #39048)Parent article: Debian switching to EGLIBC
It should be noted that one of the strengths of the Linux community (and others, of course) has been to integrate people with less than perfect social skills or lacking in empathy, bordering on asperger or autism sometimes. (Yours truly is affected and thus allowed to comment ;-)
These people sometimes bring exceptional technical skills to the community (alas, yours truly is not affected here), which they would have not been able to leverage in a more typical day-to-day office setting with pair-programming, lots of communication, and so on.
That is by no means an excuse for being rude, and sometimes apparently not even trying to overcome the issue (but apparently rejoicing in it), as often evident on LKML - but I dare say it is advisable to find ways how to integrate them, instead of forking away from them.
Personally, having been on some projects affected by such people, I think they make wonderful to exceptional engineers. It becomes difficult when they remain project leaders of a growing community.
Of course, it's not always possible for them to accept switching roles (control issues anyone?), but it should at least be considered by everyone. And if so, proposed in a face saving way for all involved - the comments on the terse (and arguably rude) bugzilla responses were just equally rude and juvenile, and certainly unlikely to yield a positive response.
If even that fails, sure, fork - or build up a trailing repository which pulls from the former upstream frequently as done here. Maybe even do that in parallel, to demonstrate seriousness (and ability). But don't forget the other side.
(And yes, before someone reminds me about what we did with Linux-HA, yes, sometimes, after all this has failed, running for your life is the only way to remain sane.)
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Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 14:50 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Well, yes, the community provides an excellent place for technically gifted asocial geeks :) but such people (me among them) should recognise our limitations and avoid domains we are unsuited for. So being the only hacker on a small project is fine, but being primary maintenance contact on critical and universally-used software *requires* social skills, because much of the role involves communicating with other human beings without pissing them off. If you don't want to or can't do that, find something else to do (there's nothing stopping you from doing most of the hacking work: just fob off the job of saying yea-or-nay to someone who can do it without annoying everyone.)
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 18:08 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Ya.. People have their own plusses and minuses and should be put into positions were they are going to be the most benefit. And get their egos out of the way... not everybody should be the front-man for their projects. I doubt there are many people that love hacking and getting into code and details and all that that really want to double as a public relations person. And I doubt that there are many people good at mediating disputes and doing social networking and whatnot that really want to spend all their time coding some low-level C libraries.------------------------- BTW... If your acting like a asshole and your completely right about something.. your still a asshole. A lot of people seem to think that if a they are right about a subject, argument, talking point, or whatever then that gives them allowances to be jerks. Like winning a argument is a victory and the reward is a license to be a asshat. Which it doesn't... they are perfectly within their rights to act like a jerk when they are wrong or when they are right. Being wrong or right doesn't really enter into it and nobody should be surpised when people react negatively to their negative behavior.
Debian switching to EGLIBC Posted May 7, 2009 22:39 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I don't think that this fork has to be seen as a drama. NAR suggested above that hiring two or three people to act as buffers or as interface to other people is a good way to deal with ill-mannered engineers. Well, think of this eglibc project as such a buffer. They sync from the genius but interface with the world. It could also be a good way of isolating Ulrich from user requests, and git enables such a workflow beautifully.
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