
Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer - martinml
http://err.no/personal/blog/tech/Debian/2014-11-16-23-55_resigning_from_pkg-systemd?
======
gcp
This part resonates well for me:

"Now, how did I, standing stout and tall, get forced out of my tribe? I've
been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm,
shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the
rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant
drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes
flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus
or just accusations of incompetence.

Our code of conduct says, "assume good faith". If you ever find yourself not
doing that, step back, breathe. See if there's a reasonable explanation for
why somebody is saying something or behaving in a way that doesn't make sense
to you."

It's easy to say to ignore the comments and the haters, but if you keep shit
thrown at you by people who automatically assume the worst possible for
everything, even an elephant skin gets pierced at some point.

~~~
FooBarWidget
This is part of a larger cultural problem in the programming / sysops
community. Too many people assume the worst, and way way too quickly. The
Redis author's "This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter"
([http://antirez.com/news/82](http://antirez.com/news/82)) article describes
this pretty clearly.

Even if you can write an awesome system, or an awesome article, with one tiny
flaw, immediately an army of people will jump on that single tiny flaw and
declare you stupid and incompetent, or worse, that you should be shot.

This kind of attitude does not bode well for the open source community, where
cooperation and collaboration is important.

~~~
digi_owl
At this point in time i fear the *gate trolls have latched onto this issue and
if using it for their "lulz".

------
valarauca1
Previously on Hacker News:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615962)

------
spindritf
They have seen a couple of departures lately. Joey Hess[1] blamed the way
decisions are made within the project[2].

[1]
[https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_leaving/](https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_leaving/)

[2] [https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2014/11/msg00174.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2014/11/msg00174.html)

~~~
gcp
Can you elaborate why he considers the Debian constitution a toxic document?

~~~
pjc50
I believe it's about referring technical decisions in subgroups to project-
wide political votes (general resolutions = GR).

I can see why trying to keep everything as a pure technical meritocracy is
appealing, but I don't think it's realistic. Libre software is inherently
political.

~~~
VLM
And yet, its only happened basically once in 20 years, due to a project wide
coup lead by the desktop environment people basically taking over the distro.

I don't want to leave the mistaken impression that every time someone does a
git commit to debian-policy or lintian that a GR is auto-proposed. Virtually
all historical changes to Policy or TC "cabal" decisions have been extremely
calm and compared to the recent coup. Debian minus systemd is pretty calm and
well behaved. If anything, cracks are forming because its such an earthquake
compared to all previous debate and discussion.

~~~
gcp
_a project wide coup lead by the desktop environment people basically taking
over the distro_

Maybe you should read the OP, for example the "assume good faith" parts.
Really.

------
pjc50
As a strategy for keeping systemd out of Debian, harassing the maintainers of
systemd until they quit the project is extreme, immoral, and effective.

(This is not an endorsement of the tactic!)

~~~
cwyers
I'm not sure it's all that effective. Yes, they've managed to harass this guy
into leaving the systemd team for Debian. But I don't think that's enough to
keep systemd out of Debian. And the way things are going, nothing will.

Debian is an operating system, but the amount of code that comes from people
actually part of the Debian project is very, very small in comparison to the
amount of code that comes from upstream projects. Some of those projects have
people on them who are involved in Debian, many do not. In a growing number of
cases, those upstreams are starting to rely on functionality that systemd
provides, partly because it's becoming common to have systemd available on
Linux systems, partly because it's providing functionality that nobody else is
(like logind replacing the aged and unmaintained ConsoleKit[1]).

So if upstream packages are going to rely upon systemd, what is Debian to do?
They have a limited set of options. They are:

1) Ship the packages the way the upstream built them -- dependent on logind,
for instance. Ship any systemd compatability shims that exist for people who
want to make a go of it without systemd. 2) Stop shipping packages that
require systemd, or rewrite parts of thost packages until they don't anymore.

The problem is that a lot of volunteers who maintain packages for Debian are
convinced that number one is the best -- it's the least effort for them, and
provides the best user experience for anyone on systemd. People who want to
keep systemd out of Debian are pushing for number two, and they're trying to
do it politically -- in other words, force maintainers to behave how they want
to. In a volunteer project, that's rather dicey.

But there's really no avoiding it -- if the TC had decided against systemd as
the default init, GNOME would still depend on logind, and there's still be a
fight over who had to do the work to get GNOME running without systemd.

(This is also why I'm really annoyed at people who keep screaming that Linux
is about choice -- yes, but it's not about coerced choice. Your choice not to
use systemd doesn't mean you get to force others to work on code to support
your choice.)

[1] Yes, someone forked ConsoleKit into ConsoleKit2. That happened about a
month ago, way past the point where all this debate started, and probably past
the point where most packages are going to care.

------
acd
Thanks for your work on Debian and systemd! Sorry to hear that you had to
endure flame wars.

------
icebraining
Sorry for the offtopic, but that's a great domain :) first "vanity" domain
that made me smile in a long time.

------
SEJeff
And then you have ANOTHER high profile departure like Russ Allbery from the
Debian Technical Committee:

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/11/msg00071.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/11/msg00071.html)

All of this (as a non-Debian but Fedora user) tells me that Debian is going
through a really rough time. For the future of Debian and free software in
general, I do hope they figure out how to remove all of the stop energy and
get back to making a world class distribution. Just like Redhat, there are so
many projects maintained by actual Debian Developers and Debian has written an
epic amount of man pages, just to name a few small contributions from Debian
as a distribution. It would be a very sad day if Debian devolved into another
Gentoo when Daniel Robbins left and it all went to crud, birthing (more or
less) Arch Linux in it's place.

~~~
icebraining
And Colin Watson as well? [https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/11/msg00052.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/11/msg00052.html)

~~~
SEJeff
Very sad to see

------
jordigh
Crap, and Russ Allbery resigns from the technical committee too:

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
project/2014/11/msg00054.htm...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
project/2014/11/msg00054.html)

~~~
VLM
"I think the agile philosophy got a few things right: find ways to reduce the
cost of change, empower individuals to make choices and act on them, and
reduce the cost of failure and embrace iteration instead of trying to prevent
failure in advance."

This reads as a stealth attack against systemd, as that's a pretty good
summary of the opposite of the systemd development philosophy as currently
implemented. Although he claims in his post that line is about the Debian
decision making process, which is perhaps true although very meta. Everything
systemd is about is implementing the exact opposite of the quoted line above.

My one line summary of the overall situation is the systemd project is a coup
of the overall ecosystem by the "desktop environment" people ignoring the
needs of all other users, and the "universal OS" true believers are not overly
supportive of that coup.

I'm reacting to the replacement of "universal OS" with "we're only going to be
a gnome desktop" by simply moving everything, desktops and servers, to
freebsd, other people are flaming, others are making threats, and of course
others are moving to openbsd, whatever.

~~~
yaantc
FYI, you're quoting an email from Russ Allbery, who voted for systemd:
[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html)

To quote Russ vote: "D U O V F", so systemd first and the current System V
init last ("F" was for further discussion).

In the same email from Russ you're quoting, there's this: "I would appreciate
it if people would ask for clarification rather than making assumptions, as
assumptions about other people's motives are one of the things that I find the
most demoralizing about the Debian project right now."

Worth a though IMHO.

------
danielweber
> [https://lists.debian.org/debian-
> devel/2014/11/msg00133.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
> devel/2014/11/msg00133.html)

This is a good letter about managing any kind of community dealing with a
disagreement. It's also good to get this out in front before any decisions are
made.

------
moron4hire
On the subject of bad attitudes in social groups with long-term continuity of
any kind, be it weirdos at a hackerspace or misogyny in STEM or death threats
over Twitter:

I've found that it's so hard to manage and avoid these sorts of issues because
the roots of it are laid long before it ever becomes vocalized as a problem.
It usually starts with one person who misbehaves in some way and everyone else
ignores/allows it because they don't want to be the bad guy who starts the
conflict. But it grows from there--the original bad actor grows more bold
and/or attracting other bad actors, and previously good actors start to become
resentful, start to demonstrate their own bad behavior, especially now that
they recognize the environment as tolerating it.

By the time someone says anything about it, passive-aggression has become a
large part of the group. Pruning such a large (though not necessarily
majority) part of the group could leave the group without the day-to-day
support it needs to remain viable.

Note that I'm not calling this out as a failure of any particular group
involved in this particular case. The vast majority of organizations either
don't have people who are dedicated enough to stick around, year after year,
or fall into this habit because they feel (most likely correctly) they lack
the authority to do anything about it. Most organizations are not setup from
the start to expect bad behavior, and therefor don't have the mechanisms in
place to take care of it.

I don't know how to clean up an already existing problem. I suspect that it
either takes admitting personal defeat and moving on to something new. There
might be something in going after the minor offenders, first, to undermine the
support that the long-established people enjoy in these sorts of conflicts,
but I doubt such a strategy is not so transparent to throw up red flags.

If you're starting a new organization, I plead to you: always be friendly,
always be fair, but always be firm. The _first_ time something even remotely
inappropriate happens, you _have_ to say something directly to the offender. I
can't even count how many times I've had to chide people for using the N-word
(let alone other words that should be as obvious by now). Do it in private,
there is no need to embarrass them. Public embarrassment should be reserved
for 2nd-time offenders, because if they think they can get away with it a
second time, it means they think they are in an environment that will support
that behavior, so there are probably others who think the same way and just
haven't acted yet.

You'll probably piss someone off in the process, "how dare they censor me?"
But you don't need to please everyone. You need only the good people who can
play nicely with others.

"Oh, I'm doing it ironically" is not an excuse, even if (in the exceedingly
remote case) it's true. Because context is important. You never know when
someone new is coming along and doesn't understand the person is "just
joking". And there are two ways the new person can react, neither which are
good for your organization. In the best case, they will be put off and not
return. In the worst case, they will think they've found a sympathetic
environment in which they can peddle their own bad behavior.

In the process, you absolutely must not stoop to their level. You must always
portray an outward appearance of calmness, even friendliness, regardless of
how angry you might be. It has to be clear that the issue is the behavior and
not a personal conflict.

And you have to be fair. You have to equally reprimand bad behavior, even when
you agree with the actor's thesis. There is no other way to make it clear that
you mean business.

You're not going to have a problem with the vast majority of people. You're
going to encounter one or two really obvious nogoodniks and it's up to you to
be the adult, stand up and inform them that the sort of behavior they've
demonstrated is not welcome there. If you don't ignore the elephant in the
room when he shows up, you can avoid the much more insidious problems further
down the road.

~~~
foolrush
“If you're starting a new organization, I plead to you: always be friendly,
always be fair, but always be firm. The first time something even remotely
inappropriate happens, you have to say something directly to the offender.”

Agree, but I would suggest that even then the elephant in room is a culture
lacking diversity.

Look around the culture and see how much diversity is there.

It is much easier to insulate against harrasing and derogatory remarks when
those remarks and attitudes are directed at people you respect, admire, and
value.

~~~
moron4hire
Yes, people say horrible things when they think they are in an environment
that will tolerate saying those things. But I'm going to give the management
of whatever hypothetical org of which we're speaking the benefit of the doubt
and say they don't want to start that way. I _hope_ that, for new
organizations who have yet to establish their own culture, that tendency is a
projection of expectations for the industry as a whole. My advice is for
people who are serious about being fair and equitable in their dealings with
diverse groups of people. If we don't have that baseline, I can't help them.

But with that baseline often comes a person who is specifically trying to be
nice to others and not hurt other peoples feelings. This is, unfortunately,
not going to keep bad actors from getting in and ruining the soup. Thus the
need to be firm and resolute. One must establish early, often, and
unequivocally that the org is not going to be party to exclusionary behavior.

It's easy to say, "you have to increase diversity", but that's a goal, not a
plan. Being a part of the "majority", we're not going to be able to increase
diversity by ourselves. That's rather much the whole point of the idea of
"diversity", that the homogenous group can't solve all of the problems for all
of the people of the world. That rather much includes our own damn problems
and the problems of our own damn industry.

For example, take these "<TargetedDemographic>CanCode Campz" things. I'd like
to see numbers about them. To me, they've always seemed very forced. I've also
heard first-hand complaints from said people in the target demo that the
concept is perceived as patronizing. I applaud the organizers for putting in
the effort, and their heart is definitely in the right place, but I wonder if
they aren't doing more harm than good.

It almost sounds like a chicken-or-egg paradox, that I'm suggesting you can't
foster diversity without already having diversity, but that itself is a
symptom of the problem. There _are_ very dedicated people out there who are
trying to work and trying to be accepted. I've seen first-hand how easy it is
for one, single, isolated incident to drive away the very people who would
help introduce our organization to a broader audience. We have to stop being
blind to the people who are already here.

All that it takes is to not let the vocal, hopefully-minority-of-bad-actors
drive good people away. All that it takes is the shocking, controversial
policy of just treating "them" not like "them"s.

