Re: [aur-general] About bullying in our community (Was: TU Application)

Apologies for my mis-formatted email. You may need to expand the quoted text to read it. I think I goofed it. On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 7:52 AM Adam Levy wrote:

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Even if you are 100% correct, there were a lot of other messages, not just the linked ones.

First I want to mention that I did in fact read all of the emails, but presumably someone trying to make a point about bullying in those emails would have linked to the most contentious ones. So those are the ones I reviewed prior to writing my first email.

As I recall when I was initially reading that chain, I tended to agree with the points that Eli was making. I trust his assessment of what transpired with your bug reports and I agree with his assessment of your complaints regarding how your AUR packages were handled. Frankly reputation and standing do matter here. I have seen Eli be very curt with people in the past and I am not surprised that people have taken offense. But I haven't ever seen Eli do this without some justification, normally that the person in question is ignorant of policies and procedures in a context where they have a responsibility to be informed. I have also seen Eli admit mistakes when he was wrong. So when I read what he wrote about how you were reopening bug requests that had been repeatedly closed I tended to believe him over you. It is totally reasonable to make a character judgement based on reputation and social standing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you are saying that Eli was lying or deceitful or mis-characterizing the situation.

I don't generally agree with Eli's tact but I don't agree that it crossed a line into bullying. I feel that now you are mis-characterizing what transpired. But there is some grey area here and room for interpretation so I'll grant you that. I certainly don't think calling you a liar is a fair assessment, nor is that at all productive in nearly any context.

My point about being bullied in the past is that I have a hard time seeing how anything that was said constitutes bullying. But as I pointed out, we don't have a well-defined definition of bullying, or ganging up, or violent emailing. So could we be more specific? Saying that you are whining is not bullying. In fact if you are repeatedly trying to complain about something that has already been addressed, or cannot be changed, or is outside of the scope of a conversation, then yeah I would agree that is whining. But again, whining is not a technical term, so I agree Eli took some liberty with that tact. Again I don't agree with that approach. But again, that's not bullying in my view.

I'm sorry that this ordeal has caused you distress, to say the least. However, this community doesn't exist to cater to people's feelings. We should be considerate of feelings insofar as it helps us all get along and be more productive, but there will always be times when the people in charge here will want to do things in a way that some users disagree with. Sometimes that gets communicated in a way that rubs people the wrong way and causes some hurt feelings. That's not ideal but it's not uncommon that after a user hears an explanation they don't agree with that they start to argue endlessly. I'd rather Eli's time, and all of the other TU's time, be spent on doing what they are best at: maintaining Arch. If that means that they spend a little less time being exceptionally thoughtful about other people's feelings who are repeatedly trying to argue with him, then I am personally OK with that. On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 6:54 AM Santiago Torres-Arias via aur-general wrote:

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On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 01:27:09PM +0100, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:

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Hi Santiago,

Now that the discussion period is over, I am taking time to fully answer this, since it's much more general and important than the TU application itself.

Hi Baptiste.

I read your email, and I do agree with your picture in general. I don't intend to "sweep anything under the rug" but rather keep two things separate:

1. A TU application 2. A discussion about the way some members of our community approach their peers.*

I personally want to keep both conversations separate, mostly because I think the latter could be better handled internally.

Thanks, -Santiago.

* I don't say names here because I'm sure this is not the only instance of this happening.