Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH v2 0/3] code of conduct fixes

Rainer Fiebig
2018-10-11T10:42:36Z

Am Mittwoch, 10. Oktober 2018, 18:23:24 schrieb Eric W. Biederman:
> James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> writes:
>
> > Resend to show accumulated tags and also to add a third patch listing
> > the TAB as the reporting point as a few people seem to want. If it
> > gets the same level of support, I'll send it in with the other two.
>
>
> There is also:
>
> > Our Responsibilities
> > ====================
> >
> > Maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior
> > and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to
> > any instances of unacceptable behavior.
> >
> > Maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject
> > comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are
> > not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any
> > contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening,
> > offensive, or harmful.
>
> Which is very problematic.
> a) In append only logs like git we can not edit history.
> Making it a mainters responsibility to edit the history, to do the
> impossible is a problem.
>
> b) There are no responsibilities of for people who are not Maintainers.
> That is another problem.
>

As a reminder/clarification one could introduce a line like this:

Responsibilities
================

All participants are responsible for complying with this Code of Conduct.

Maintainers are responsible for[...]

> c) The entire tone of the reponsibilities section is out of line with a
> community where there are no enforcement powers only the power to
> accept or not accept a patch. Only the power to persuade not to
> enforce.
>
> Overall in the discussions I have heard people talking about persuading,
> educating, and not feeding trolls. Nowhere have I heard people talking
> about policing the community which I understand that responsiblity
> section to be talking about.
>

I think Eward Cree aired this concerns early on in the discussion:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/19/234

> Increasingly I am getting the feeling that this document does not the
> linux development community. Perhaps a revert and trying to come up
> with better language from scratch would be better.
[...]

+1.
Nobody would get hurt or loose face by doing so. On the contrary.

My suggestion would be:
- revert the patch
- discuss the matter (and the way it was introduced) at least at the next MS
- setup a task-force to come up with a new proposal
- discuss the proposal
- make corrections, if necessary
- implement it

IMO there's no need to rush things in a matter so important for the future
of the project.

So long!

Rainer Fiebig

--
The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
Richard Feynman