[D-community-offtopic] Whistle blowing

[Zenaan Harkness]

On 12/7/13, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> If you blow the whistle against a nation or big company you're a hero,
> if you do the same for Linux you're a troll :D.

I disagree.

Note, I did not say "you are wrong". I did not say "Gnome3 is bad;
DBUS is bad; systemd is really evil" :)

Thick skin is good, for inter-personal matters yes?

Ralph perhaps you might find utility in choosing to make "owning"
statements more often - like "_I_ dislike Gnome3", or even better "I
dislike DBUS because jackd has a dependency on dbus and won't run
unless dbus is first running, and when I run dbus, then my favourite
email program causes 'urgency' messages to appear on my desktop which
I don't like".

When genuine technical issue is spoken, then there is a chance that
the problem can be fixed, or bug report made etc. And this type of
discussions feels fruitful to others on the list, people see we are
working together, we are (may be slowly) fixing problems by reporting
bugs and fixing actual problems.

Ralph, I am giving these examples because you make it easy for people
to shout "troll!"
When you or me or anyone makes broad-brush stroke statements of
assumed fact and absolute truth, which is in reality (ie in the words
written in the email), no more than personal opinion, then the
statement-maker is an easy target for "you are a troll!" accusations.

It is not only ok, but a good thing, for all of us on debian-user for
example, to encourage each other to keep discussions on-topic,
especially when they go too far off-topic.

Of course we on debian-user want to encourage _Debian_ usage, and want
our debian-user list to be not swamped with emails or whole threads
promoting other GNU/Linux distributions and/ or dissing Debian
GNU/Linux and/ or "bagging" or bad-mouthing debian software on grounds
that are not clearly stated (opinion, or user-interface, or
low-level).

Good luck,
Zenaan