OT: General behaviour of the community (from 'Why winetools is utterly useless, once and for all')
I was interested to read several comments on this list in respect of such comments as 'IQ of zero'. Such comments were the final straw in leading me to take this action. A few days ago I sent a comment to the list. Nothing really sinister, just an observation and an experience. Before long I had a particularly vicious and vile diatribe sent in reply to my comment - to my private email address. I have appended the lower headers and the bulk of the message I received at the end of this message (trimming the html from the bottom). I thought long and hard before taking this action. It is not something I would normally do, but in this instance I was so incensed at this individual's behaviour that I felt that 'naming and shaming' was the only way forward. Not even so much as to the fact that he directed his comments to me, but more the fact that had I been a new prospective developer, the effect such diatribe would have would not in any way be positive. It certainly would taint their perception of the open-source community. Furthermore I sincerely doubt that I am the only one to experience this behaviour. Others may just suffer in silence. I have worked with many smaller community projects, on OS/2 and latterly on Linux, and never been subjected to this kind of abuse from members of the community. I joined this list because I felt that there was something I could contribute to Wine, and in the instance it turned out that there was. I did not join it to receive unsolicited email of an abusive nature from members of the community. Had he done this by telephone I could have had him prosecuted, at least in the UK. But he hides behind a gmail.com address and makes comments I seriously suspect he would not have the balls to say to my face. No, I do not believe that we need a 'net police force'. Common decency between individuals, however, is essential. Diversity, discussion, criticism, expression, even annoyance are all valuable when driving a project forward. Blatant personal abuse is not tolerable. It is not tolerable in society, it should not be tolerated in the developer community. The community needs to police itself, rather than be policed, and individuals who bring the community into disrepute need to be dealt with by the community. That is why I bring this into the open. How to prevent such actions? I do not think it that this is possible in its entirety. I can (and have) simply add this individual's address to my blocked list. However, I may have been a newcomer to open-source development who would not have been so tolerant, and whose opinions of the community may have been changed by this action. May I suggest that whoever is responsible for the hosting of the mailing list change the configuration so that email addresses are not placed in the header? (I am no expert on mailing-list software but it does not immediately seem to be impractical.) That way all replies have to go to the list and this would prevent such unsolicited email being sent. This is my last word on this matter. Make of it what you will. I refuse to be prevented from contributing to vital projects such as Wine when I can by the antics of some depraved individual. It has left a sour taste in my mouth though, and like it or not, it does not portray Wine developers in a good light. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disposition-Notification-To: Segin <segin2005(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:01:11 -0500 From: Segin <segin2005(a)gmail.com> User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (X11/20051202) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Dr J A Gow <J.A.Gow(a)furrybubble.co.uk> Subject: Re: Winetools -> wine doors References: <1143192770.25116.22.camel(a)despair.kent-music.com> <442441D7.7020107(a)furrybubble.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <442441D7.7020107(a)furrybubble.co.uk> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------010900050103010506060607" X-BV-Spam-Score: 0.4 (/) X-Envelope-From: segin2005(a)gmail.com X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------010900050103010506060607 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dr J A Gow wrote:
I've looked through the winetools code and it is a clusterf*ck of nonsense. It appears to be in the final stages of code rot, however
This "clusterf*ck of nonsense" helped me to get a microcontroller development suite running under Wine, which otherwise would not install
You're a fucking retard, RTFM! You'd learn you need to use DLLOverrides in Winecfg.
natively. After over ten years designing and developing embedded systems, there is one thing that stands out.
That you're a dumbfuck?
Code that is 'nonsense' does not work at all.
That's 100% definitive of Winetools.
Code that works may not be elegant, it may not be pretty and you may hate the style, but it _works_
Nope, wine doesn't do ~/.wine/config, which makes winetools COMPLETELY useless. **WINETOOLS DOES NOT DO A DAMN REDEEMING THING FOR WINE USERS THAT ARE UP TO DATE!!!!**
and therefore it is not nonsense.
Yes, it is.
This code works, is useful and serves a purpose. Just because you don't like the way it is written does not make it nonsense. Language, please!
No IT DOES NOT!
John.
So you're saying that you don't know how to use dlloverrides on winecfg, right? that's basically the same thing winetools does except that wine now ignores the config file (makine winetools utterly useless, 100%, no questions asked). please just install all the native DLLs that winetools installs, and set a dlloverride in winecfg of * (native, builtin) for your exe file. Please stop spouting your mis-infomation.
On 3/29/06, Dr J A Gow <J.A.Gow(a)furrybubble.co.uk> wrote:
I was interested to read several comments on this list in respect of such comments as 'IQ of zero'. Such comments were the final straw in leading me to take this action.
Thank you. It sometimes takes a thick skin to ignore the petty and childish rants that are prevalent online. Anonymity (or pseudo-anonymity in this case) often leads to childishness, and has done so since the beginnings of the Net. It gives the impression to potential new users and developers that the "community" is hostile and unwelcoming. I experienced a little bit of myself when asking my first couple of [naive] questions in IRC at #winehq. While it's completely understandable that people will get tired of seeing the same questions posted over and over again, there's no need to get hostile about it unless the user asking the questions gets hostile or demanding themselves (and even then, restraint or kick/ban would be preferable). If someone asks a "stupid question" (entirely subjective, remember), just ignore it or point to a place where they can learn the answer themselves. Please don't be a jerk. Thanks.
Totally agreed. Segin needs to be not just kick/banned from the list, he needs to be K-Lined, if not G-Lined from all things wine! With respect to his comments though, on behalf of everyone involved with the project, and with the community as a whole, I sincerely apologize. Tom On 3/29/06, Jason Green <jave27(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/29/06, Dr J A Gow <J.A.Gow(a)furrybubble.co.uk> wrote:
I was interested to read several comments on this list in respect of such comments as 'IQ of zero'. Such comments were the final straw in leading me to take this action.
Thank you. It sometimes takes a thick skin to ignore the petty and childish rants that are prevalent online. Anonymity (or pseudo-anonymity in this case) often leads to childishness, and has done so since the beginnings of the Net. It gives the impression to potential new users and developers that the "community" is hostile and unwelcoming. I experienced a little bit of myself when asking my first couple of [naive] questions in IRC at #winehq.
While it's completely understandable that people will get tired of seeing the same questions posted over and over again, there's no need to get hostile about it unless the user asking the questions gets hostile or demanding themselves (and even then, restraint or kick/ban would be preferable). If someone asks a "stupid question" (entirely subjective, remember), just ignore it or point to a place where they can learn the answer themselves. Please don't be a jerk.
Thanks.
I'm pretty sure people are capable of filtering their own email. Afaict the offending emails were between two individuals. You may not like them but that has no bearing on whether they should be allowed to post to the mailing list given that those emails to the mailing list are appropriate. Chris On 3/29/06, Tom Spear <speeddymon(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Totally agreed. Segin needs to be not just kick/banned from the list, he needs to be K-Lined, if not G-Lined from all things wine! With respect to his comments though, on behalf of everyone involved with the project, and with the community as a whole, I sincerely apologize.
Tom
On 3/29/06, Jason Green <jave27(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/29/06, Dr J A Gow <J.A.Gow(a)furrybubble.co.uk> wrote:
I was interested to read several comments on this list in respect of such comments as 'IQ of zero'. Such comments were the final straw in leading me to take this action.
Thank you. It sometimes takes a thick skin to ignore the petty and childish rants that are prevalent online. Anonymity (or pseudo-anonymity in this case) often leads to childishness, and has done so since the beginnings of the Net. It gives the impression to potential new users and developers that the "community" is hostile and unwelcoming. I experienced a little bit of myself when asking my first couple of [naive] questions in IRC at #winehq.
While it's completely understandable that people will get tired of seeing the same questions posted over and over again, there's no need to get hostile about it unless the user asking the questions gets hostile or demanding themselves (and even then, restraint or kick/ban would be preferable). If someone asks a "stupid question" (entirely subjective, remember), just ignore it or point to a place where they can learn the answer themselves. Please don't be a jerk.
Thanks.
On 3/29/06, Chris Morgan <chmorgan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm pretty sure people are capable of filtering their own email. Afaict the offending emails were between two individuals. You may not like them but that has no bearing on whether they should be allowed to post to the mailing list given that those emails to the mailing list are appropriate.
Chris
Be that as it may, the person who made those comments made them as a direct attack on someone who posted to the list. Regardless of whether or not the insults were posted to the list, he shouldn't have made them. As the person who reported the incident said, had it been a new developer interested in helping wine (either directly by contributing code to the project, or indirectly by writing a support app), he probably would have said screw this, I'm not going to help out a project that has developers who verbally attack me. I know I would have. Sure we all have to deal with someone who is annoyed at a stupid comment or question every now and then, but those were not stupid (not in my opinion), and had some very valid points. If the "attacker" had done some research instead of spouting off because he was tired of users complaining about something not working and it turning out to be because of winetools, we wouldnt be having this convo. With all of that being said and trying to get back on topic, sure winetools breaks a lot of things, but from what I can see, it also gets a lot of things working. If we have better documentation and if (here is the key) the users took the time to read thru all of the docs, which I admittedly don't, there wouldnt be any need for winetools. Honestly, I think that winetools should have been (from the beginning) something that creates a second installation of wine, from source, and that plays with registry files outside of the main wine install. IOW a user who uses wine doors should have a directory structure like this / -wine-source --all the uncompiled and unlinked files -wine --all the binaries and dll's, etc for a proper wine install (including wineprefixcreate, the wine executable, etc) -~/.wine --all the files outside of binaries -wine-doors --all the binaries and dll's etc for a proper wine install (like wine-doors instead of wine, and wineprefixcreate-doors, etc) -~/.wine-doors --all the files outside of binaries modified to work with different apps Then a user can run ./wine-tools and it will present them a prompt saying "Detecting app to be run... Internet Explorer" "Merging changes to wine registry to allow running of internet explorer" "Changes Merged" "Running Internet Explorer" Then boom.. Up pops IE.. That is what winetools should have done. But since it doesn't, we are working on wine doors. A much more user friendly wine tool that will have more features. Of course, I'm not sure how it's going to look, and since I don't speak fluently in C, I won't be contributing, but hopefully it will be better than winetools without all of the problems of winetools... Tom,
I'm pretty sure people are capable of filtering their own email. Afaict the offending emails were between two individuals. You may not like them but that has no bearing on whether they should be allowed to post to the mailing list given that those emails to the mailing list are appropriate.
Chris
Be that as it may, the person who made those comments made them as a direct attack on someone who posted to the list. Regardless of whether or not the insults were posted to the list, he shouldn't have made them. As the person who reported the incident said, had it been a new developer interested in helping wine (either directly by contributing code to the project, or indirectly by writing a support app), he probably would have said screw this, I'm not going to help out a project that has developers who verbally attack me. I know I would have.
How do you propose we prevent people from emailing people that post to wine-devel? How do we choose who gets to email people directly and who doesn't? How do we filter the contents of their email? Segin doesn't speak for the entire community and he isn't a lead on the project. If that were the case this would be a more serious matter. If people quit because of him then what are we to do? Given the lack of relationship between wine and Segin they might as well have quit wine development because of some Nigerian money transfer email or other spam. My point is that the solution isn't trying to enforce censorship where you simply cannot and where it doesn't impact the community. As long as he doesn't abuse his list membership we have no reason to become involved in this issue. You won't find me supporting any kind of restrictions on what he says or which mailing lists he can belong to at this point in time. Chris
On 3/29/06, Chris Morgan <chmorgan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How do you propose we prevent people from emailing people that post to wine-devel? How do we choose who gets to email people directly and who doesn't? How do we filter the contents of their email?
Segin doesn't speak for the entire community and he isn't a lead on the project. If that were the case this would be a more serious matter. If people quit because of him then what are we to do? Given the lack of relationship between wine and Segin they might as well have quit wine development because of some Nigerian money transfer email or other spam.
My point is that the solution isn't trying to enforce censorship where you simply cannot and where it doesn't impact the community. As long as he doesn't abuse his list membership we have no reason to become involved in this issue. You won't find me supporting any kind of restrictions on what he says or which mailing lists he can belong to at this point in time.
Chris
Ok, but here is a point for you to chew on. Say that I go on a business trip for my company, and that while on this trip, I meet with some clients, and we go out for a business dinner. A few days later, while still out of town, I run into those clients again, and we all decide to go to a billiard. While at said billiard we all start drinking. No problems there. But if I continue drinking, eventually I am going to get drunk, and need assistance getting back to my hotel room. Mind you I am on a business trip and with some clients, but I am not at a business meeting. Even though I am (at the time) not representing the company, it still looks bad for them that an employee would do that in front of the client. The same principle applies here. It looks bad on the wine project as a whole that someone who participates in the devel list would email someone (even off list) and say the things that were said. Ordinarily I am against censorship myself, but I do believe in moderation, and I believe that people should be held accountable for their actions even if they are speaking only for themself, if it makes other people or things look bad. To answer your question, there isnt really a way, and I wasnt trying to say that we should prevent him from emailing others directly, or filtering his emails, I was saying that a lot of the things he does for the project should be restricted. AFAICT he has some high level permissions on bugzilla, and the appdb. Maybe those could (should?) be suspended temporarily, I dunno, I will leave it up to the big wigs here to decide if he should be punished in any way, and if so, what that punishment should be. As I said though, it is his opinion, and he is entitled to that opinion (at least in the US), but I think he should have kept it to himself, or at least not used such strong wording like "****ing dumb***"....
participants (4)
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Chris Morgan -
Dr J A Gow -
Jason Green -
Tom Spear