Re: Contributors and maintainers

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

"John Wiegley" <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> The lack of respect I'm receiving is *not* of the kind where someone is
>> being actively nasty, insulting, etc. It's a kind where a person's very
>> voice is being denied, not even countered. That's pretty grave.
>
> Taylan, I don't understand. Looking at emacs-devel and the bug tracker, I see
> that many people have responded to you. Here are the reply counts:
>
>     26 Eli Zaretskii
>      9 Paul Eggert
>      9 Dmitry Gutov
>      7 Random832
>      3 Michael Albinu
>      3 John Wiegley
>      3 David Kastrup
>      3 Artur Malabarb
>      1 Stephen J. Tur
>      1 Nicolas Richar
>      1 Daniel Colasci
>
> Eli has taken the time to write back to you 26 times! This doesn't even count
> the sub-threads where we discuss meta issues not directly related to your
> issue.
>
> Can you share with me what your real concern is? Do you worry that Emacs is
> not secure enough? Is their an active threat of some kind in your environment?
> Perhaps there's something about your use case we're not seeing, that would
> explain the greater importance of this issue to you.

John, I'm afraid you're looking at things too superficially.  I honestly
don't remember a single response that even seemed to acknowledge the
concern I've explained multiple times in detail, except for responses by
Random832.  Having responded at all is not proof of having addressed the
concerns; rather most of those responses were diverting away the topic
while ignoring my actual concern.

Straight out remaining silent would not have irritated me nearly as
much, if at all.  One usually can't draw any clear conclusions from
silence.  But being rapidly responded to, each time with a different
diversion from the main concern, is eventually very agitating.

> We've been living with the current shell-quote-argument for literally
> *decades*, which might explain why we're not instantly ready to make changes
> -- even though Eli has made a change to the docstring at your request. How
> does that constitute "no response"? I am confused.

It made a change that was neither asked for (by me at least), nor
addressed my concern.  Think about how irritating it must be to spend a
lot of effort to explain a concern, *also* provide a patch which solves
that concern, and then have the maintainer reject your patch and instead
apply one of their own which *doesn't* address your concern.

> Also, it does not help to reiterate how clear and cogent your arguments have
> been. Until we both agree, "clarity" and "cogency" have not been achieved.
> These attributes must exist *between* disputants; they cannot be determined by
> one side alone. We have all been working to achieve clarity, but I fear this
> has been misunderstood as a stubborn rejection of your ideas.

The problem is that the concern was not even acknowledged, let alone
being shown the courtesy to be openly disagreed with.

And all the while reiterating my main concern that remained unaddressed,
I *did* try to address many of the counter-concerns that were raised,
although in the grand scheme of things they only served to divert
attention away from my concern.


All of this may not be easy to see to an outside observer of the topic.
Of course, I know what my main concern is very well, but if the thread
contains an equal or greater number of mails talking about other
concerns than mine, then to an outside observer my concern will simply
become less visible, and appear like any of the arbitrary concerns that
were raised and discussed, whichever of them ultimately addressed...

All that might make it very hard to understand why such a level of
irritation would happen in first place, which is why I'm trying to take
a sort of empirical approach to the problem, which is to enumerate the
mails in which I explain the same concern, and ask for mails in which
that concern is clearly acknowledged, and responded to with explicit
disagreement or a solution; anything but bringing up a "related" topic.
If there is a failure to find such mails in the discussion, despite the
spurious amount of mails reiterating the main concern, I hope that's a
clear, somewhat empiric indication of the social problem.

I wish we had a professional psychologist or sociologist as part of the
maintainer team. :-)

Taylan