Re: May I ask questions ? [WAS: On SSL library support]

Hi Enrico,

On Fri, 2012-05-04 at 18:43 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > The point is, they are not relevant for LibreOffice's goals. In
> > fact, since you're distracting other contributors from LibreOffice
> > goals, they are in practice against LibreOffice goals, so it may
> > happen that ignoring you will be achieved by technical means, 
>
> Ah, you wanna ban me from the list, just because I ask questions
> that matter to me, instead of playing the coding monkey for you
> on issues that dont matter to me ?

        It seems to me, that you contribute a lot of opinionated email, and
thus far no useful code. That noise is in itself a problem - it makes it
harder to read the list and the list itself a less welcoming place.

        It also confuses newcomers in a few undesirable ways: into thinking
it's acceptable to be noisy -and- not contribute; and also into taking
your input and views seriously - simply because they are articulated :-)
It takes effort to correct you, and that in turn creates more noise and
wastage. That is not ideal.

        So - unless you consider the impact of what you write, and the fact
that (without concrete contribution) your view is rather uninteresting
in a developer meritocracy, I'd personally also support some technical
mechanism for reducing your volume. We don't have a huge un-met need for
people to tell other people what to do here. Similarly, there are enough
problems for a man-lifetime with the code-base, and simply complaining
about them without constructively helping on them serves little useful
purpose.

        And no - of course that wouldn't mean a ban; perhaps just manual
moderation and review for relevance. Keeping the list balanced,
on-topic, friendly and in proportion to contribution is rather important
- so far we have had a very clean, friendly and useful list, keeping it
that way is important. There is of course the discuss@ list for general
discussion.

        It is sad to me that you havn't responded to gentle private feedback on
this topic; that is the ideal outcome. I'm sorry we ended up here.

        As for issues that don't matter to you - I'm here to try to help you to
concretely contribute to LibreOffice and make it do what you want it to
(within reason). So - I would suggest you focus your efforts on a single
task, discuss that here, ask for input, etc. drive it to completion and
inclusion, so that there is some contribution to back up your input
which will give it much more credibility. Then - I'll be happy to read
and take your input most seriously, as I'm sure will others.

        I hope that doesn't come across as too harsh,

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot