LWN: Comments on "Protecting communities"

Protecting communities

alankila — 2013-04-03T00:39:36+00:00

I appreciate the intention here, but I suspect the guy is just a plain old narcissist.

Protecting communities

PaulWay — 2013-04-01T23:41:47+00:00

One of the things I've learnt in programming is that there is a time for coding and a time for thought. If you're doing one when you should be doing the other, then you end up wasting a lot of effort. And it's more frustrating to throw away code - and therefore people end up writing kludges and ugly band-aids rather than redesign, which ultimately wastes more time.

And when everyone is saying that they need to discuss something, and you're the only one saying that you should do just write code, it's more likely that you're wrong. If you're the only one saying "hold on, let's think about this" and everyone else is just getting in and writing code, then you might be wrong and you might be right - but it's more likely that thinking about it will contribute something even if other people have gone ahead with code.

I mean this with respect: has anyone checked whether Scott has just had a manic episode? I've seen friends go through this; Stephen Fry's documentary "The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive" is an excellent explanation of both the symptoms and the life of the sufferer. This, to me (as an amateur psychologist), has all the hallmarks: just wants to get in and do stuff, doesn't care who he insults, everyone else is clearly wrong, and long, somewhat rambling posts explaining their position. This is not an insult; I'd rather see some level of support for someone that might be heading toward a big depressive episode.

Hope this helps,

Paul

Protecting communities

alankila — 2013-03-29T18:19:15+00:00

I read some of Scott's contributions on the mailing list and he can be rather frustrating person to deal with. He has frequently accused people of trolling, but in my judgment these people were making good faith effort to contribute or engage with development of some feature. It is not surprising that a few comments like that sour relationships.

Overall his style is 'code first', and that seems to be close to the root of the problem. He appears to find the slower and more measured pace of discussing and planning ahead frustrating.

Protecting communities

renox — 2013-03-29T12:30:10+00:00

> Canonical decided to create its own display manager for Ubuntu rather than work to help improve Wayland, and Android has yet another solution of its own.

If you look at the timeline, Android was released with its own solution when Wayland was still in its very early phase, so I think that this sentence should be improved as it can easily be misunderstood..