Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 0:08 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296)
In reply to: Some comments are just… beyond comment by lunaryorn
Parent article: An unstable Debian stable update

> If you have nothing to say about the behaviour of the users in that thread, silence is an option.

I think a lot of us have seen it and are quite a bit more concerned with the maintainer's behaviour.

If a maintainer is going to ignore bug reports and play the victim when people get angry, we need a new maintainer.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 3:47 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> If a maintainer is going to ignore bug reports and play the victim when people get angry, we need a new maintainer.

...I hear Jia Tan is looking for another gig.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 2:41 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (1 responses)

Jia Tan at least improved xz and generally kept it working ;-) there was some quality contribution history…

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 7:23 UTC (Thu) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link]

In another part of this thread I defended parts the backlash, and explicitly wrote about how I didn't believe a specific quoted message was problematic. But I can't in good conscience let that be the only message of mine in this thread, when I see something like your reply.

You are using humor to do nothing else than insult someone. That's not a strongly worded disagreement, that's a personal attack, and in my opinion that IS crossing a line.

The other message criticized a specific action (or set of actions), here you are disparaging the totality of all contributions someone ever made. Messages such as this make the life of those who want to express their disagreement without personal attacks so much harder. In my opinion your statement here is much, much worse than the dismissiveness to the impact and severity of the bug shown from the other side.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 4:42 UTC (Wed) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link] (22 responses)

> I think a lot of us have seen it and are quite a bit more concerned with the maintainer's behaviour.

That's fine, but why reply to me with that concern when I did not comment on that at all?
I'm obviously not interested in coming after the maintainer and tried to put focus on an another aspect of the situation.

> If a maintainer is going to ignore bug reports and play the victim when people get angry, we need a new maintainer.

If that had evidently happened, I might agree with you, but things are not that clear (they seldom ever are) and I interpret that situation quite differently.

But I believe we have very different ideas of "clear basic professionalism and understanding of our responsibilities" (your words), and whom we expect it from, which probably makes us see this situation from very different standpoints, and personally I must admit that I'm very happy to work in environments and communities where your standpoint is not prevalent.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 5:11 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (21 responses)

> But I believe we have very different ideas of "clear basic professionalism and understanding of our responsibilities" (your words), and whom we expect it from, which probably makes us see this situation from very different standpoints, and personally I must admit that I'm very happy to work in environments and communities where your standpoint is not prevalent.

I hope nobody has to rely on your work for anything critical!

In my community, I take a firm stance that responsibilities and clear and accurate communication come first; the point of what we do is to deliver code that people can trust and rely on, and if there's a screwup we need to know about it - and that generally means it'd be my screwup, the buck stops with me.

I've explicitly stated on quite a few occasions if my code screws up and ruins someone's day, I don't care if the bug report comes with swearing; or if someone working on my code has a good frustration filled rant - I want to hear it, and I'm going to bake and mail a plate of cookies to the first person that has a good (i.e. actual information content) rant about my code.

Strangely enough, this builds an atmosphere of trust, and I find things tend to stay pretty calm and relaxed among those of us who actually work together.

You have to accept that mistakes _will_ happen, and those mistakes can ruin people's days - or weeks - and if you're prioritizing your own work environment and safety cocoon to the point you don't want to hear about that, you're just pushing the problem elsewhere and eventually it's going to come back to bite you.

Like this poor guy.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 7:18 UTC (Wed) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link] (20 responses)

> I hope nobody has to rely on your work for anything critical!

I certainly don't do and wouldn't want to do critical work unpaid in my own free time. I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of messages such as the one I quoted, after having volunteered my time to build something people can use for no charge.

Professionally, I do work on critical systems, and strangely enough, I find that we can build a culture of responsibility and mutual trust without swearing, by being nice and kind to reach other, and treating or peers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. Perhaps that's the corporate world you were talking about elsewhere, but when the alternative is this, I rather take corporate culture any day.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 11:59 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

> > I hope nobody has to rely on your work for anything critical!

> I certainly don't do and wouldn't want to do critical work unpaid in my own free time. I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of messages such as the one I quoted, after having volunteered my time to build something people can use for no charge.

That's fine. We have a 2x2 grid here. People who do and don't work on mission critical stuff. People who do and don't do it in their own time. You say you're quite happy NOT to be in the quadrant "Mission Critical, Own Time". I'd hate to be in it, too.

The problem is people who (a) ARE in that quadrant, and (b) throw a hissy fit when notified about a bug.

My personal attitude is if you're working on Mission Critical, then Own Time should not enter the equation. Equally, while professionalism comes into it, provided the reporter doesn't abuse *me*, I don't care about language. People get frustrated, people have to vent, let them get over it and then you can fix the problem, which is the most important thing.

Thing is, if the people on *both* sides of bug report get heated, that's when things go wrong. My real bugbear is when people are so busy shouting "fix it", they are completely unable to hear me saying "fix what!?". And when I do nothing they just scream even louder. If someone is screaming, you both need to shut up and take a step backwards.

Cheers,
Wol

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 19:53 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (4 responses)

I work on mission critical stuff as my day job (a Google SRE). An outage of one of my services would (hypothetically) have extreme and far-reaching effects on many different Google products (up to and including total unavailability). Although we have generally avoided such a massive outage during my time at the company, there have been quite a few close calls and scary situations over the years. The pattern of system A causing problems for system B, and then the SREs for B urgently contacting the SREs for A, is quite common and routine in my experience.

I have *never* seen anyone speak to me, or any of my colleagues, in such a disrespectful tone as the message quoted upthread, no matter how bad things were. From where I sit, it is a matter of simple observation: You do not need to be rude in order to work on mission-critical systems, and that fact does not change just because the fecal matter made contact with the Aperture Science Rotational Airflow Enhancing Device.

Of course, the difference is that Google can and does fire people who make a habit of being rude (and fail to respond to lesser interventions). Internet communities, as a rule, are significantly worse at doing that.

(Disclaimer because there will otherwise be a slew of replies claiming that I'm trying to justify how bluca handled this bug: I am doing no such thing. It is entirely possible for both parties to be in the wrong here. If you want to argue over bluca's handling of the bug, take it to a different sub-thread, because I frankly do not care.)

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 20:23 UTC (Thu) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (2 responses)

I used to work at Google too, and the difference is that it's a closed environment where you have to demonstrate a high degree of competence to be there, and there's very much a culture (especially among SREs) of post mortems, not assigning blame, etc. - and critically, there's a chain of command so that if you screw up at your job and aren't learning or taking responsibility for your mistakes, your coworkers have recourse and won't just be stuck with you. And you control your _entire_ stack, you can call up or walk to the desk of whatever component you rely that isn't working.

It's wonderful for the people who get to work there.

But you, like a lot of people, are focusing on rudeness as the issue, when a lot of us are going "uh, machines going down on update, intransigent maintainer with a pattern of not acknowledging or fixing his own mistakes, blame shifting, and forcing other people to cover - yeah, I'd be pissed too".

Do you think people at Google would maintain their calm demeanor if you had to keep everything running while dealing with that?

I think you might have cause and effect a bit backwards :)

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 27, 2025 19:56 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> But you, like a lot of people, are focusing on rudeness as the issue,...

Yes, because if you care about any success metric, then communication is the most important thing by far. Building something exceptional _alone_ never goes anywhere. I mean it can be fun and beautiful but that's all. If it's really exceptional _and_ re-usable, then it's sometimes rescued by other people who can work together. And then the "inventor" complains he was misunderstood. He was. Often it stays unused on the shelf. Everyone can admire it but that's all.

No maintainer is perfect, very far from it. But any widely distributed component is direct evidence that the maintainer has at least the most basic communication skills. If not, then either the maintainer or the component gets forked or replaced sooner or later. Simple as that. The same cannot be said about entitled users shouting on the Internet, there's just no evidence on their side.

> Do you think people at Google would maintain their calm demeanor if you had to keep everything running while dealing with that?

They would stay professional long enough for the problematic person to be demoted or transferred to another place better suited for them. If that does not happen or takes too long, then professional people try to find a another job in a proper workplace.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 28, 2025 12:37 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> But you, like a lot of people, are focusing on rudeness as the issue

Two sides of the same coin, effectively.

The point is that you need to get rid of the whole coin, i.e. "fix" both sides (for whatever value of "fix"), if you want to get a handle on the problem.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 21:14 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

The quoted comment was not responding in that aggressive way to the existence of the bug. It was responding to the handling of the bug report: in particular deciding the issue had an importance of "minor" with all that implies procedurally. This is not really comparable to your situation, unless Google SREs are in the habit of dismissing colleagues' outages as minor and not important enough to fast-track a fix for.

I try to follow the old internet protocol advice "be strict in what you send and lenient in what you receive", when dealing with other people. You never know what is happening in someone's life. The question is not whether this particular comment is abrasive. The question is, is this a pattern of behavior or is it an aberrant, in the moment reaction? If it's a one-off, give grace and look the other way. If it's a pattern of behavior then something should be said. If it keeps happening after that, then something needs to be done.

But that goes for the maintainer, too, not just the commenter. I think it's disingenuous to concentrate only on one side of the conversation. It's idealistic, not realistic, to say "it doesn't matter what one side does, there's no excuse for the other side to behave in anything less than a fully professional manner".

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 14:27 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (10 responses)

> Professionally, I do work on critical systems, and strangely enough, I find that we can build a culture of responsibility and mutual trust without swearing, by being nice and kind to reach other, and treating or peers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. Perhaps that's the corporate world you were talking about elsewhere, but when the alternative is this, I rather take corporate culture any day.

You're missing the cause and effect here.

In the open source world, where no one can get fired for screwing up, having a culture based on responsibility is even more important than in the corporate world (though still important there, I'd say!).

If you build your culture on "I'm only going to interact with people who are nice to me" - that's not the culture of responsibility you want, and you'll find lack of accountability leads to lack of trust, which leads to exactly the sort of drama this LWN article is talking about.

If you build your culture on "taking responsibility for our work comes first", then you'll find people are a whole lot nicer to you.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 15:34 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> having a culture based on responsibility is even more important

....This goes both ways, because the *user* also shoulders a burden of responsibility too.

> If you build your culture on "taking responsibility for our work comes first", then you'll find people are a whole lot nicer to you.

That may work amongst "peers" (ie other developers) but end-users don't care about that.

I absolutely "take responsibility" for my work. But that is going to happen on *my* schedule/availability, completely detached from your sense of urgency. You don't like that? <taps on the "PROVIDED AS-IS, NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER" sign>. You are not buying from a supplier, you are a raccoon digging through dumpsters for free code. [1]

[1] https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 15:46 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (2 responses)

I find that attitude to be less than helpful if I want my code to be reliable and bulletproof.

Because code doesn't get to be truly bulletproof without testing and QA, and that's done by users. Meaning, I need them, and I need them to be willing to go to the effort of filing good bug reports, and on complex bugs I need them to be willing to spend the time to work with me on chasing things down. Which means I have to be willing to send the time to work with them, it has to go both ways.

A "take it or leave it attitude" only works if you really don't need someone, otherwise it's a great way to make people not want to work with you.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 16:07 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> A "take it or leave it attitude" only works if you really don't need someone, otherwise it's a great way to make people not want to work with you.

...Please keep in mind that you are among the very few that are paid to work on "your code"

The overwhelming majority of us are not, and that changes the equation considerably.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 16:22 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link]

Yep, and saying "we're going to do things right, ship working code and take responsibility for our screwups" attracts people to the project :)

A lot of people want to be a part of something like that.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 2:44 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (2 responses)

Debian generally provides a bit more guarantees to its users than “none”, though.

And precisely that is what allowed it to reach such a well-accepted status in commercial environments.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 11:19 UTC (Thu) by kpfleming (subscriber, #23250) [Link]

Where are these guarantees published? I've never seen them.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 12:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Debian generally provides a bit more guarantees to its users than “none”, though.
> And precisely that is what allowed it to reach such a well-accepted status in commercial environments.

Pray tell, where can this "guarantee" be found? Because Debian's "social contract" [1] provides nothing of the sort.. and isn't legally binding anyway.

[1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 17:16 UTC (Wed) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link] (2 responses)

I can only repeat that we apparently have very different ideas about all this, to a point where I'm beginning to believe that it's no use continuing here, because we'll just continue talking past each other.

I guess I understand what you're trying to say, but no amount of arguing is going to convince me that swearing and being yelled at is essential to building a culture of responsibility in open source.

Or, to put it another way, if it is really necessary to build a culture of responsibility, as I believe you're trying to argue, then I firmly believe something's seriously wrong in open source, and, pardon me for saying that, I'm all the more happy that I'm not part of this open source thing.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 17:51 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (1 responses)

If you're not a part of it, and don't want to be a part of it, and all you're here to do is directly tell someone who actually is an open source maintainer who actually is focused on building a community that balances all this stuff that you have "very different ideas...."

Well, good for you then?

Let's stop here

Posted Sep 24, 2025 18:02 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

At this point it seems like this is just sparring rather than extending the conversation, so let's end here.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 24, 2025 14:48 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (2 responses)

Or, to put it another way: "being nice to people" is a about a lot more than words when we're all doing work that other people rely on.

"Being nice" means doing our work well, so that other people can rely on it instead of having to spend a bunch of time recovering from our mistakes, and taking responsibility for our mistakes when they do happen.

If you want to talk about "being nice", you have to include that. Otherwise you're saying - "I can do whatever quality of work I feel like and you guys just have to put up with it, neener-neener!". No thank you :)

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 13:24 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you want to talk about "being nice", you have to include that. Otherwise you're saying - "I can do whatever quality of work I feel like and you guys just have to put up with it, neener-neener!". No thank you :)

While I am more-than-typical to harp on code quality and maintainability, there is a definite difference between the level of quality one can expect from a back-burner project to one that has a salary-like funding behind it. For example, I have have a number of projects on Github that have external users. But I do not have the time to *support* these users beyond things that also scratch my itch or answering questions in issues. This is where the NO WARRANTY clause really comes into play. You're running bcachefs as a project that you *want* to be used far-and-wide and are, appropriately, taking things as seriously as one should when it comes to code quality (nb. I have not actually looked at bcachefs code to vet it on my own scale, but will take your word for it). But for a tool I publish the source for (because I believe in publishing such code) that I use to help with task juggling? Patches welcome, but if it interferes with my workflow, feel free to fork.

Some comments are just… beyond comment

Posted Sep 25, 2025 13:51 UTC (Thu) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link]

Yeah, 100%.

Only some open source software is critical infrastructure, and it's of course a very broad spectrum. Some little library might turn out to be useful and start getting used all over the place, and if you were never expecting or planning for that... well, that's a whole 'nother topic on things we haven't yet learned how to deal with :)

We really do need better funding and support structures in place, assuming businesses will fund the stuff they need doesn't work because businesses are always focused on their quarterly bottom line. Europe's making baby steps in this direction, but we have a long way to go.

But if you're explicitly writing code for a domain that has a prior history of being critical infrastructure, the expectations are high. There are real consequences - for other people - for going in and claiming a job as yours, and then doing it badly. If you're not up to the job, that's ok! let it wait for someone else to tackle it!