Tom Wickline twickline@gmail.com wrote:
I gladly take the side of vitamin on this issue. I believe he is a valuable member of the FOSS community, he has contributed many patches to this and other OSS projects. And in HIS free time he volunteers on the #winehq IRC channel to help people who want to accept his help... He tried to help YOU and YOU refused to try what he ask YOU to do!! YOU kept asking the same stupid *shit* over and over and over until you got on his last nerve. He cant help someone who doesn't want to help them self.
Also, it doesn't look to me like he cussed anyone out! but I guess I just cussed YOU as I used the poo word in this reply. :D
I beg your pardon if I got this wrong, but I seems to me that Jonathan is *Pie-rate* rather than carretto. While carretto did ask the same thing over and over until vitamin gave him the download link, Pie-rate only asked once (timestamp: 09:43:50 PM), to which vitamin replied with his "oh well".
I don't want to take any sides here — especially because I refrain from going to support channels exactly to avoid such situations —, but I have to say that vitamin's behavior in that discussion is definitely less than polite. However, I do think that Jonathan made the issue a bit bigger than it actually is.
Ah, yes, regarding cussing around, I recall reading vitamin saying "F***" to Pie-rate twice, all the while not cussing *carretto* out.
Anyway, being civil does no harm.
My 2¢.
- Pedro.
Jan Zerebecki, I'd be happy to help, but how? I could develop some guidelines and rules for admins to follow, but then what? How would they be enforced? I have no authority to put such things in place. Its not the writing rules that's hard, its the enforcing them. Here: i'll write them now: Either participate politely or don't participate at all Break up flamewars, don't start them.
James Keane, "oh well" is a valid answer to my question that would have solved my problem? I think you're getting mixed up between caretto and I. "He is not our employee we can not reprimand him for his actions and neither can you." There needs to be some kind of structure, though. Presumably, unless he's the project leader, there's someone who can take away his admin privileges. There should be guidelines for how admins behave, and admins who don't behave according to said guidelines should have their admin privileges suspended or removed.
Abel Chiaro, he said "I don't f*** care where you download the file to caretto, not me.
Tom Wickline, I am Pie-rate, not carretto. I still don't agree with how he handled carretto. Maybe the community should try appointing admins based on people skills, not coding skills?
The problem here is I asked a question in a help channel, not to him specifically, but he answered it just to state that he doesn't care. He then banned me for voicing concern over whether he should be doing such things.
Juan, I think I sent my previous message to you instead of the list. Sorry for sending it to you twice. Ok, no one really got the message here. I guess it really wasn't clear, and that's my fault. I am Pie-rate. The comment about windows was probably offtopic, but its not nearly as ridiculous as vitamin cussing out both caretto and I, and banning me for voicing concern over the fact that an admin is doing such things. vitamin: carretto, I do not f*** care where you download the file. vitamin: Pie-rate, STFU if you have nothing to say Ok, the swearing is really not that bad. I don't really care if someone swears at me. What really gets me angry is that vitamin *banned* me for voicing a perfectly valid point, when vitamin answered a question with "oh well," without trying to help, and before anyone else tried to help. As I said, this would be rude if he was some random guy, but he's an admin. As I said before, this is like inviting someone to an installfest, and then spitting in their face and saying "STFU RTFM GO AWAY AND GOOGLE." All it does is makes people distance themselves from OSS as far as possible.
"This is an invitation to flame if ever I saw one, and if civility flies out the window, it begins here." No, civility flies out the window HERE: (09:44:34 PM) vitamin: Pie-rate, oh well and HERE: vitamin: carretto, I do not f*** care where you download
Civility is important to a degree in the freenode channels, but swearing like a sailor while banning people who complain about it is just ridiculous. As an admin, you should be helping politely or not helping at all, and breaking up flamewars, not starting them.
As for the fix to my problem, that's completely beside the point now.
I hope that clears some things up.
On 8/16/07, Juan Lang < juan.lang@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Jonathan, I'm changing forums here, as I don't agree that wine-devel is the appropriate place for it. I'm cc'ing vitamin, since he's being discussed.
I'm also breaking a rule against top-posting, since I want to state my position up front: I agree that civility is important. I also agree that vitamin sometimes lacks tact. So let's look at the post a little bit:
On 8/15/07, Jonathan Challinger mr.challinger@gmail.com wrote:
Below is a log of #winehq, from 9:44 to 10:09 on Wednesday August 15th: (09:43:50 PM) Pie-rate: my brother's girlfriend's WoW install is crashing (locking up, stops responding) randomly. she will install windows tomorrow if it doesn't get fixed. i don't like windows and i don't want to deal with it.
I'm sorry, but this bit about Windows is completely off-topic.
the message it crashes with is: (09:43:50 PM) Pie-rate: err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x509da8c "?" wait timed out in thread 0047, blocked by 003e, retrying (60 sec)
Okay, that's a real problem. Now we're getting somewhere, though it's hard to diagnose.
(09:43:50 PM) Pie-rate: this is with an install copied over from my computer, which i KNOW works flawlessly, and wine 0.9.41
Now we have a problem. Installing apps into Wine is the only supported configuration. Copying over installations isn't supported, and this is well documented (see the FAQ in the wiki: http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-3647fcb12328bf8f43d7cfce4d0dcbcee12c0541 )
I know this is no consolation, but we often see requests from people who don't follow the instructions, and that tries our patience. It's been said over and over again, but since not everyone is getting message, I'll say it again:
- Don't copy programs from a Windows install.
- Don't use winetools or ies4linux or anything else that installs a
bunch of Microsoft DLLs.
If you do, we can't (won't) help you, as the problem may or may not be with Wine.
(09:43:54 PM) carretto: vitamin: what? (09:44:10 PM) carretto: vitamin: _period? (09:44:15 PM) vitamin: <vitamin> carretto, you have to install the game on Wine
Vitamin makes this point again here. Since it has been well documented, I think he shows civility by not flaming about it.
(09:44:34 PM) vitamin: Pie-rate, oh well (09:44:43 PM) Pie-rate: vitamin: "oh well?" (09:44:46 PM) Pie-rate: vitamin: no magic fix? (09:44:55 PM) carretto: vitamin: wine <game install>? (09:45:11 PM) vitamin: carretto, something like that
Again, this seems civil to me. "Oh well" is not particularly clear, but Pie-rate (sorry, I can't tell who's who) clears it up just fine, I think.
(09:45:33 PM) otaku [n=otaku@c-24-15-187-230.hsd1.il.comcast.net ] entered the room. (09:46:53 PM) carretto: vitamin: wine: Call from 0x40136e to unimplemented function MFC42.DLL.6929, aborting (09:47:10 PM) vitamin: carretto, get the newer version of that dll (09:49:56 PM) carretto: vitamin: i donwload MFC42.dll on dll.files and past to wine system folder (09:50:04 PM) vitamin: carretto, get the newer version of that dll (09:50:14 PM) carretto: here i get the newer version? (09:50:21 PM) vitamin: from windows
Again, all perfectly civil, and correct. Since mfc42 is not part of Wine, an application calling into a missing function in it is a symptom of a problem with the installation, not with Wine.
(09:50:50 PM) carretto: vitamin: i download version v. 4.21.71 (09:51:32 PM) shingo2 [n=shingo@p5487EFF1.dip.t-dialin.net] entered the room. (09:52:27 PM) carretto: vitamin: where i get the new version? (09:54:48 PM) prgrmr [n=prgrmr@bzq-88-154-138-152.red.bezeqint.net] entered the room. (09:55:37 PM) _3 [n=lol@89-178-108-192.broadband.corbina.ru] entered the room. (09:57:20 PM) carretto: vitamin: can help me? (09:57:38 PM) vitamin: carretto, I already answered all your questions
Again, civil and true.
(09:57:50 PM) Pie-rate: vitamin: Read the topic. "End user/tech support channel for Wine." A derogatory-sounding "oh well" is nothing more than flamebait. Either say nothing, or help. That's what I try to do, and that's what's in the best interest of the project. I believe you are a channel admin, correct? Saying "oh well," without even trying to help is rude, but saying "oh well" without even trying to help, as a channel admin? That's like inviting people to an installfest, and then when they ask for help installing something saying "OH WELL" and spitting in their faces.
At this point, I think Pie-rate loses it. This is an invitation to flame if ever I saw one, and if civility flies out the window, it begins here.
Regarding whether Vitamin acts appropriately as a channel admin: there are two issues here. First, do channel admins have the responsibility to maintain civility? Second, do channel admins in #winehq have the responsibility to help people with wine?
In my opinion, the answer to the first is yes, channel admins do have that responsibility. If people are flaming, a channel admin can try to tone things down a bit before tempers flare. vitamin did an admirable job being patient, I think, if he lost his patience at the end. Frankly, I would have too.
The answer to the second question is a resounding no. In fact, I, a longtime Wine developer (and channel admin), am often less qualified to help people with their programs than other users are. I prefer to let the community help itself out, and when I do jump in irc - admittedly more and more seldom these days - I rarely have an answer before someone else does.
Basically, I think civility may have been lost a little bit in this exchange, but it didn't begin with vitamin. I also think your expectations for support are quite high!
Anyway, if you are Pie-rate, best of luck with your girlfriend's computer. Cheers, --Juan
On Thursday 16 August 2007 20:27:04 Jonathan Challinger wrote:
Jonathan,
without wanting to give the impression that you posted on this list and now everybody is ganging up on you, I do have a couple of comments here.
Jan Zerebecki, I'd be happy to help, but how? I could develop some guidelines and rules for admins to follow, but then what? How would they be enforced? I have no authority to put such things in place. Its not the writing rules that's hard, its the enforcing them. Here: i'll write them now: Either participate politely or don't participate at all Break up flamewars, don't start them.
I completely agree for mailing lists. But this doesn't really map well to IRC. Communication is much less precise and faster in chat. I don't have a good solution. Does someone have a good set of explicit rules that work for IRC?
There needs to be some kind of structure, though. Presumably, unless he's the project leader, there's someone who can take away his admin privileges. There should be guidelines for how admins behave, and admins who don't behave according to said guidelines should have their admin privileges suspended or removed.
That's not the way it works, though. There need to be people willing to do this job. If you have a large number to pick from, you can be picky. Vitaliy devotes a lot of time to helping people in #winehq, even though I agree he is a bit rude from time to time. Still, you will find that he's really helpful if you ask "smart questions", as esr defines them.
Tom Wickline, I am Pie-rate, not carretto. I still don't agree with how he handled carretto. Maybe the community should try appointing admins based on people skills, not coding skills?
Agreed. Ideally the developers should do as little user support as possible to be able to spend more time developing. However, most wine users only come into #winehq to bitch about some programs not working and to ask for help. Again, if more people in there were actually active helping people, someone would have said something else than "oh well", and don't tell me you'd just have ignored the "oh well" in that case.
Of course building a good community is important, and I think your email scratches the surface of the problem Wine as a project has with it's community. But that's material for a different thread.
The problem here is I asked a question in a help channel, not to him specifically, but he answered it just to state that he doesn't care. He then banned me for voicing concern over whether he should be doing such things.
Ok, if you don't mind I'll dissect the question a little.
[some formatting added for better readability]
<Pie-rate>: my brother's girlfriend's WoW install is crashing (locking up, stops responding) randomly.
Here, you describe the problem you're seeing. So far, so good.
<Pie-rate>: she will install windows tomorrow if it doesn't get fixed. i don't like windows and i don't want to deal with it.
Here, you're trying to to stress how important your problem is. While this might be important for you, it is not for me, and I doubt it is for lots of other Wine developers. I don't work on Wine because I want to make more people switch to Linux. I stopped caring what operating system people use about six years ago, as long as they don't mind what OS I use.
Frankly, I started working on Wine because I was paid to work on it, and while I'm not paid anymore, I like the challenge of working on problems like figuring out how Windows ticks and to make Wine tick the same way.
But back to the analysis.
<Pie-rate>: the message it crashes with is: err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x509da8c "?" wait timed out in thread 0047, blocked by 003e, retrying (60 sec)
This is not really helpful, but arguably that's a bit hard to tell without knowing Wine. So I'd say this one is fine.
<Pie-rate>: this is with an install copied over from my computer, which i KNOW works flawlessly, and wine 0.9.41
If I'd do that on Windows, it'd break for a lot of apps. Why people think Wine is different is beyond me. As Juan said in his email. the FAQ clearly states not to do that.
Civility is important to a degree in the freenode channels, but swearing like a sailor while banning people who complain about it is just ridiculous. As an admin, you should be helping politely or not helping at all, and breaking up flamewars, not starting them.
I still fail to see how this is connected to being an op or not. This should be a general rule.
Anyway, looking at my experience with Open Source help channels, you're basically always expected to have read the FAQ before asking questions if you want someone to help you. You actually didn't ask a question and you stated that you hadn't read the FAQ. So I think an "oh well" response, while certainly not ideal, was well justified.
I agree with you that banning people who disagree is bad style. Personally, I'd probably just ignore the whole thing. But starting the conversation in a "I'm a paying customer, and if people don't do what I want, I'll spend my money elsewhere" style message certainly doesn't help. We do get that a lot, and having done support in a volunteer organization myself, I know this gets on your nerves quite quickly.
Anyway, I don't want to single you out for being the bad guy, I just wanted to explain a little why the echo you got here was the way it is.
Oh, one other thing. It's a bit rude to take a personal email back to a public list without consent of the poster, especially if the poster stated that he didn't want the email to go to said list. Also, top-posting is against common mailing list etiquette.
Cheers, Kai
I'm not going to continue this. This is my last message concerning this argument.
I just have a few things to point out. Yes, there should be specific rules for IRC. Obviously, when there aren't, things like this happen. I'm still banned from the channel, people in this mailing list have said he shouldn't have banned me, and yet, I'm still not unbanned.
Even if you don't have a lot of people to choose from, there should still be rules for those you do choose. This is a channel for END USERS. End users DO NOT ASK "SMART QUESTIONS." PERIOD. If you can't answer a "stupid question" in a civil way, by explaining how to ask or by linking to a guide to asking a smart question, don't answer it at all. Hell, I code decently myself, I've been using wine for over a year now (I think), and I STILL don't know that "err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x509da8c "?" wait timed out in thread 0047, blocked by 003e, retrying (60 sec)" is useless. Like I said, if it was a some random guy, it would've been rude. As a channel admin, he can at least exhibit some civility and say "that's a useless error message," instead of "oh well." Furthermore, if there was a known issue with certain hardware, that message would not be useless at all, as it is the only information available about the crash. As I would've explained if he'd been civil and MENTIONED that copying the files was a bad way to do it, I've been using a copied wow directory myself with the same version of wine with no problems.
"I still fail to see how this is connected to being an op or not. This should be a general rule." It is connected to being an op because it is the op's JOB to keep the conversation civil. If he can't keep HIMSELF civil he has NO BUSINESS being an op, and frankly, no business being in the channel, period.
"you stated that you hadn't read the FAQ" Where? Do you intend to ban every noob that asks a question without reading the FAQ?
"starting the conversation in a "I'm a paying customer, and if people don't do what I want, I'll spend my money elsewhere" style message certainly doesn't help." I didn't. I merely stated that her switching to windows is out of my control and that I don't want to deal with fixing windows. In hindsight, yes, I would have phrased my question differently. Still, if you're going to offer a free help channel for free software you're essentially writing for charity, you should at least be prepared to be civil to those people who ask for help with a "tone" that you don't like. Its in the interest of the success of the project. If people stop using the app because the admin of the channel was a total fucking dick and publicly announced that he didn't care if the problem got fixed, the userbase of the project goes down, and eventually it dies. It will not have any developers, because no one wants to develop for a project with no users.
I can so very easily circumvent the ban, and come back and ask the question when vitamin isn't around. I haven't, and I don't intend to. I'm done with wine, and now I'm done discussing its community's serious flaws.
On 8/16/07, Kai Blin kai.blin@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday 16 August 2007 20:27:04 Jonathan Challinger wrote:
Jonathan,
without wanting to give the impression that you posted on this list and now everybody is ganging up on you, I do have a couple of comments here.
Jan Zerebecki, I'd be happy to help, but how? I could develop some guidelines and rules for admins to follow, but then what? How would they
be
enforced? I have no authority to put such things in place. Its not the writing rules that's hard, its the enforcing them. Here: i'll write them now: Either participate politely or don't participate at all Break up flamewars, don't start them.
I completely agree for mailing lists. But this doesn't really map well to IRC. Communication is much less precise and faster in chat. I don't have a good solution. Does someone have a good set of explicit rules that work for IRC?
There needs to be some kind of structure, though. Presumably, unless
he's
the project leader, there's someone who can take away his admin
privileges.
There should be guidelines for how admins behave, and admins who don't behave according to said guidelines should have their admin privileges suspended or removed.
That's not the way it works, though. There need to be people willing to do this job. If you have a large number to pick from, you can be picky. Vitaliy devotes a lot of time to helping people in #winehq, even though I agree he is a bit rude from time to time. Still, you will find that he's really helpful if you ask "smart questions", as esr defines them.
Tom Wickline, I am Pie-rate, not carretto. I still don't agree with how
he
handled carretto. Maybe the community should try appointing admins based
on
people skills, not coding skills?
Agreed. Ideally the developers should do as little user support as possible to be able to spend more time developing. However, most wine users only come into #winehq to bitch about some programs not working and to ask for help. Again, if more people in there were actually active helping people, someone would have said something else than "oh well", and don't tell me you'd just have ignored the "oh well" in that case.
Of course building a good community is important, and I think your email scratches the surface of the problem Wine as a project has with it's community. But that's material for a different thread.
The problem here is I asked a question in a help channel, not to him specifically, but he answered it just to state that he doesn't care. He then banned me for voicing concern over whether he should be doing such things.
Ok, if you don't mind I'll dissect the question a little.
[some formatting added for better readability]
<Pie-rate>: my brother's girlfriend's WoW install is crashing (locking up, stops responding) randomly.
Here, you describe the problem you're seeing. So far, so good.
<Pie-rate>: she will install windows tomorrow if it doesn't get fixed. i don't like windows and i don't want to deal with it.
Here, you're trying to to stress how important your problem is. While this might be important for you, it is not for me, and I doubt it is for lots of other Wine developers. I don't work on Wine because I want to make more people switch to Linux. I stopped caring what operating system people use about six years ago, as long as they don't mind what OS I use.
Frankly, I started working on Wine because I was paid to work on it, and while I'm not paid anymore, I like the challenge of working on problems like figuring out how Windows ticks and to make Wine tick the same way.
But back to the analysis.
<Pie-rate>: the message it crashes with is: err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x509da8c "?" wait timed out in thread 0047, blocked by 003e, retrying (60 sec)
This is not really helpful, but arguably that's a bit hard to tell without knowing Wine. So I'd say this one is fine.
<Pie-rate>: this is with an install copied over from my computer, which i KNOW works flawlessly, and wine 0.9.41
If I'd do that on Windows, it'd break for a lot of apps. Why people think Wine is different is beyond me. As Juan said in his email. the FAQ clearly states not to do that.
Civility is important to a degree in the freenode channels, but swearing like a sailor while banning people who complain about it is just ridiculous. As an admin, you should be helping politely or not helping
at
all, and breaking up flamewars, not starting them.
I still fail to see how this is connected to being an op or not. This should be a general rule.
Anyway, looking at my experience with Open Source help channels, you're basically always expected to have read the FAQ before asking questions if you want someone to help you. You actually didn't ask a question and you stated that you hadn't read the FAQ. So I think an "oh well" response, while certainly not ideal, was well justified.
I agree with you that banning people who disagree is bad style. Personally, I'd probably just ignore the whole thing. But starting the conversation in a "I'm a paying customer, and if people don't do what I want, I'll spend my money elsewhere" style message certainly doesn't help. We do get that a lot, and having done support in a volunteer organization myself, I know this gets on your nerves quite quickly.
Anyway, I don't want to single you out for being the bad guy, I just wanted to explain a little why the echo you got here was the way it is.
Oh, one other thing. It's a bit rude to take a personal email back to a public list without consent of the poster, especially if the poster stated that he didn't want the email to go to said list. Also, top-posting is against common mailing list etiquette.
Cheers, Kai
-- Kai Blin WorldForge developer http://www.worldforge.org/ Wine developer http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin Samba team member http://www.samba.org/samba/team/ -- Will code for cotton.
aren't, things like this happen. I'm still banned from the channel, people in this mailing list have said he shouldn't have banned me, and yet, I'm still not unbanned.
Ouch.
I will say that I appreciate all that Vitaliy does; he truly does an amazing amount of helpful work. I also have great sympathy for his frustration with users.
Further, I think the assessments of the conversation are essentially accurate; Vitaliy was quite reasonably frustrated with the conversation.
But I want to state for the record that I think Jonathan is correct on one point: he should not have been banned, and he certainly should not be banned now.
That was an overreaction and an abuse of op privileges, in my opinion.
Vitaliy, I think you should take a break, or /ignore, or /kick, or use some other tool to ease your frustration; a ban is inappropriate except in the most extreme cases, in my opinion.
Cheers,
Jeremy
On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 08:06:01PM -0700, Jonathan Challinger wrote:
I'm not going to continue this. This is my last message concerning this argument.
I'm done with wine, and now I'm done discussing its community's serious flaws.
This is sad, after all a community is as good as the participants make it.
On Thursday 16 August 2007 20:27:04 Jonathan Challinger wrote:
Jan Zerebecki, I'd be happy to help, but how? I could develop some guidelines and rules for admins to follow,
Though formulating proper communication guidelines is some work (one can borrow text and wisdom from projects that may have something like this; freenode, fedora, ubuntu, gentoo, debian come to mind), the real work is discussing it, asking everyone whose comments matter and getting everyone to agree.
but then what? How would they be enforced?
Obviously then the people with the authority will support the needed enforcement. But IMHO the best atmosphere is when nobody needs to wield their powers.
On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 08:06:25AM -0500, Jeremy White wrote:
he certainly should not be banned now.
Done. In the future please don't discuss policy, rules or problems with ops/admins on #winehq but e.g. on #winehq-social ( unless we decide in the future that this is on-topic in #winehq ).
a ban is inappropriate except in the most extreme cases, in my opinion.
I think so, too. But others may have other opinions. As far as I understood Vitaliy Margolens position is that anyone who questions a admin/op should get banned.
We have #winehq-social where anything can be discussed and nobody gets banned (unless they do advertisement or/and malware).
Another problem is that we don't have a rule for when/how to unban.
So if we could agree on rules for when and how to ban and unban, it would be a good start and our community should become a bit more pleasant.
Jan
-
Abel Chiaro -
Jan Zerebecki -
Jeremy White -
Jonathan Challinger -
Kai Blin