Who maintains RPM? A defense of Jeff Johnson [LWN.net]

Who maintains RPM? A defense of Jeff Johnson

Posted Aug 24, 2006 20:29 UTC (Thu) by sarnold (guest, #39590)
Parent article: Who maintains RPM?

I've known Jeff for years; while I've had my fair share of arguments with RPM (and I've lost many :), I have always enjoyed discussing my problems with Jeff. He doesn't always like my proposed solutions to problems, but he has always been willing to talk about what problem I'm trying to solve so that he can help find a solution that works better for more people.

Mistakes were made in RPM's development, but blaming every deficiency of RPM on Jeff is also a mistake.

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Who maintains RPM? A defense of Jeff Johnson

Posted Sep 2, 2006 2:01 UTC (Sat) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

I agree with sarnold on this.

Jeff's sarcasm and sometimes rude comments seems to have grown over time and if a company is unable to correct this for a 2 years timespan the problem is related to lack of communication or lack of resolution inside the team/company and not entirely Jeff's responsibility.

I wouldn't be surprised if discontent, burn-out or lack of empowerment are the cause of abusive language and these are symptoms that are easy to detect and act upon. (People-skills!)

AFAICS Jeff is still maintaining RPM in good faith (despite recent public sarcasm towards Red Hat/Fedora). Red Hat however seems to favor to fork the project. This inability or unwillingness to reconciliate is an unfortunate escalation of something that is in essence fixable by good communication and mutual respect.

I hope a fork can be avoided by fixing what is broken. (and I'm not talking about RPM :-))

PS Backporting Jeff's work without credit for the work (Jeff already made statements about that on bugzilla) is not a good way forward. Ignoring him will also not fix the issues at heart.

PS2 Also the bugzilla entry is NOT about database corruption. You can have the same symptoms by just removing files on your disk. RPM will list them as *missing*, but of course the rpm database will still list them. That's 'work-as-designed'. You can argue if that is expected behaviour during installation, but this is not database corruption. If you take this in consideration, Jeff's comments make much more sense and less rude. KainX's comments clear this up, but the author fails to make this clear. The bug-report is basicly wrong. It does not condone the rude remarks in both directions.