On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 12:24 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by misc
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Yesterday on a radio show for kids one of them asked why it was necessary to be polite. The guest scientist then took pains to explain politeness was not hypocrisy, it was a way to show others your regard, and when people attempted to get by without those archaïc useless norms (at a guess in the 60's or 70's) it didn't end well.

Now Lennart is the archetypal example of coder prima dona who does not bother to be polite and will ruthlessly trample over other people feelings if he thinks he is technically right. That is why he generates such feelings even in "normal" people, nothing more, nothing less.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 13:43 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (13 responses)

Now Lennart is the archetypal example of coder prima dona who does not bother to be polite and will ruthlessly trample over other people feelings if he thinks he is technically right.

Please provide links to back this, it's an empty accusation.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 16:12 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (8 responses)

journald, json as a configuration language in pulseaudio, etc

But, you already knew all that, and I have better ways to spend my time than arguing with a fan club. misc wrote a reasonable message, I answered it, that's enough as far as I am concerned.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 17:48 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (7 responses)

I am not sure how your reply addresses your claim. Technical choices for a configuration format has nothing to do with not being polite or trampling over other people's feelings.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 18:00 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (6 responses)

It was treated the usual I am RIGHT everyone else is WRONG LP way (with "look how cool LP is" bystanders). json is gone in systemd without any apology (but more abrasiveness on other format alternatives)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 18:56 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, if anyone didn't think their choices were right, they wouldn't be making the choices they do. I don't see why a change in configuration format in an entirely different software requires an apology or to whom. Sorry but I still don't have much of an idea what you consider a problem.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 19:01 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

> Well, if anyone didn't think their choices were right, they wouldn't be making the choices they do.

There's a difference between thinking that their choices were right and being unwilling to consider that they may be wrong.

good programmers, and especially good project leaders need to be open to the possibility that they may be wrong and listen to feedback.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 19:05 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> There's a difference between thinking that their choices were right and being unwilling to consider that they may be wrong.

Sure and systemd has changed a lot based on external input. Abstract conversations OTOH don't accomplish much.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 19:52 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

The polypaudio/pulseaudio community needed a way to describe some digital audio properties in a fairly standard and extensible way that wouldn't need protocol updates in the future and they settled on JSON.

As far as I know it was not a sole decision made Lennart so it would be good if you could actually reference that discussion when he declares that.

You need to be a bit more spesific what you mean by "json is gone in systemd without any apology"

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 12:53 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't even see any JSON in /etc/pulse, ~/.config/pulse. Nor has, to my memory, systemd ever used JSON except as one of the export formats in journalctl.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 13:33 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

You should be directing these comments at nim-nim where I in the comment you responded to am asking nim-nim to clarify and reference to what he meant by Lennart solely deciding upon JSON in pulseaudio as well as what he meant by JSON being gone in systemd without any apology.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 20:11 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

I recall seeing a Gentoo package maintainer getting some quite nasty verbal abuse from LP and his lackeys in an IRC channel in response to legitimate technical questions, and I'd be happy to link the page if not for the fact said developer's blog archives seem to cut off at 2012.

There's evidently been no attempt to fix the underlying bad attitude in the few years that've passed. What surprises me is that it's taken this long for a major backlash to happen.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 20:16 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Yet another unsubstantiated and unverifiable claim.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 17, 2014 17:06 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

I retract that claim; after several hours of digging through archive sites it wasn't LP who made that specific attack after all, but De Icaza and the Mono crowd. Their similarity must've confused me. Apologies go to those whom it's due.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 17, 2014 18:16 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

The retraction is a good first step. But I require more from you.

I require that you also affirm that you will defend "LP and his lackeys" as you call them in the future if you see anyone making a similar unsubstantiated claim of abuse and actively deflate the meme that "LP and his lackeys" are extraordinarily abusive. If you can't affirm to do that in the future and if you choose to stand silently by while the meme continues to spread you are still complicit in helping spread it with your mistake here. It's like lighting a fire and saying you're sorry, admitting you set the fire but still standing there watching it burn a house down. Time for you to pick up a bucket of water and do help put the fire out.

Oh and stop calling other developers lackeys. That'd be pretty good too.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 13:48 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Now Lennart is the archetypal example of coder prima dona who does not bother to be polite and will ruthlessly trample over other people feelings if he thinks he is technically right. That is why he generates such feelings even in "normal" people, nothing more, nothing less.

I don't think that this is actually the case. People don't seem to mind being treated the same way by Linus Torvalds and other icons of the community who are just as unwilling to suffer fools gladly. It also seems to be difficult to actually come up with concrete examples where Lennart Poettering was really rude (ruder than, e.g., someone like Linus would be) to somebody on a systemd mailing list. Which does not detract from the fact that it is a convenient meme to circle the wagons around even if there is no actual proof, and so it gets trotted out over and over again. Now as a matter of principle it would be great if on the whole there was more politeness around but if you think Lennart Poettering is rude then I would recommend you stay very far away from the likes of DJB or Theo de Raadt. In addition, there are people in systemd development who are way less abrasive, and while Lennart P is getting his attitude adjusted (or not) it might make sense to talk to them instead.

The main problem many people seem to have with Lennart Poettering is that he had the chutzpah to write PulseAudio and then not to bend over backward in order to clean up or work around other people's shit (such as bugs in other people's ALSA drivers). This attitude together with the fact that some distributions shipped PulseAudio while it was quite new and the bugs in the ALSA drivers in question had not yet been fixed gave him a bad reputation that was, if anything, only partially deserved, but is still good enough for “Lennart broke our systems with PulseAudio and is now going to break them again with systemd”.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 14:41 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

What is even worse is that the Alsa community has had the opportunity to stand up and correct this misconception towards pulseaudio and Lennart but instead have chosen to bury their head in the sand and turn a blind eye when individuals are cyberbullying Lennart in that regard which is quite frankly disgusting and arguably one of the reason this misconception about pulseaudio and Lennart has escalated this far in the first place...

One thing that those cyberbully's need to start understanding is that Lennart is and never has been acting alone but I guess it's easier for them to single out and attack one individual from within group of developers or a community regardless if he had any saying or doing or involvement in whatever they are trying to blame/frame him for, than the entire group or the community itself.