…the more of an asshole it becomes. Alternatively, the more things change, etc. What I will say is not intended as a remark against Daniel or anyone. It is merely observation. Mistakes were made, and they continue to be made. The sad thing is that they are the same mistakes.
In the days of drobbins (no link, you can google it), there was once an incident where a problem developer was acting up. Well, this problem developer was not malicious to gentoo. He made statements as did drobbins. The incident I speak of was sparked by an indirect quote that the problem developer made to someone else. When drobbins got wind of it, he ordered that the problem developer’s access be revoked. On a few occasions, I did disagree with drobbins (I know the perception about where I stood in those days, but disagreements were kept private). This occasion was one of them. I argued in semi-public (it was avenj’s presence) that the access be restored immediately, because the problem developer’s intentions were not known, and could have been misunderstood (misunderestimated, if you will). Thankfully, drobbins had the presence of mind to recover from his initial reaction and proceed calmly.
Proceed to today. We have a problem developer (I won’t link to him, but it’s enough of a circus and enough of a divisive issue, that if you’ve paid any attention in the last 5 minutes, you know who it is) of sorts now. He has an ongoing case. His case is under investigation by Developer Relations. In fact, the fact-finding portion has ended, and now the decision-making process starts. Yet, a small group of people have taken it upon themselves to revoke his cvs access. And that’s it. Nothing more can be done or said. No decision by the representative community (devrel, the council, etc). Just a unilateral decision within a vacuum, based on supposition of security. Granted, problem developer is a little immature, and tends to like stirring the shit, and indeed has done some stupid things that have been used as the basis for infra’s decision. The fact, however, is that this is now a community distribution. There are proper channels for this sort of thing. There is at least the assumption of civility, wherein people are informed (devrel/the council) beforehand. And the civility of informing the person with an email, not by having their commit failed. That is simply malicious (whether it was meant as such I do not know, but the perception of maliciousness is definitely there).
The thing that’s common in both cases is that the problem developer found out about it not by a nice email or irc chat, but because their cvs commit failed.
This is not a rant against infra, per se. It’s rather a rant against the general direction Gentoo has been taking in the last few months — let’s say 18 months or so. It’s the assumption of mistrust and presumption of disrespect. We used to be the polite ones (and the user community thankfully has remained so). Now, most of us are just assholes to each other and to the users.
Maybe it’s the size of the group. None of this seems prevaricated. It all actually seems like an inevitable consequence of growth. Have we become what we hated in the first place?