[Dbix-class] The email I didn't want to write.

[Matt S Trout]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2016 at 11:33:12PM +0000, Matt S Trout wrote:
> > >...
> > >
> > >Meanwhile, we've now reached a point where seeing a ticket or patch sent in
> > >by ribasushi tends to result in people ignoring it for a few days because
> > >they need to work up the emotional stoicism required to deal with the chances
> > >of it being a useful patch/ticket that happens to come with a free polemic.
> > 
> > Citation needed. Please provide an example where I have been abusive
> > or even slightly unprofessional in a bugreport. Issue trackers are
> > generally always part of the public record, so it shouldn't be a
> > problem to back up what was said above.
> 
> I could go back and find somebody mentioning being made to feel like that
> and to then cross-reference to the ticket, but that would require outing
> them as having said so and given your general treatment of disagreement in
> this thread I'm not convinced that's fair. People may choose to disregard
> this assertion on my part as a result if they so wish.

Ah, here we go, one where the author has largely noped out of the perl
community after the resulting debacle:

https://github.com/perl5-utils/List-MoreUtils/pull/9

Impugning character rather than acknowledging technical disagreement:

"Still utterly missing (or deliberately ignoring) the actual problem..."

The various unncessary bolding that simply makes the tone more hostile.

Describing the thread as a "train-wreck of a conversation"

Resulting in (1) rehsack considering that "My impression is still that
most of the thread is more about mood than about hard facts." and (2)
rejecting further discussion with "Personal hint - stop the affronts and
search for a way to step forward in a cooperative manner."

Even if riba genuinely believes in his reply of:

"I urge you to stop making it personal. None of the recent discussions
are about you. They are fully and exclusively about grossly suboptimal
decisions. You just happened to be the one who carried these decisions out."

I feel like "it's not about you, it's just about all your decisions being
terrible" isn't really an effective way to move things forwards, especially
since it clearly resulted in the actual argument we were trying to make
being lost since rehsack's take-away was

"Trying to enforce something without technical reason in a technical world
is insane and the way how you do it is personal."

This is a classic example of a conversation where I was on the same side of
the technical argument as ribasushi, but his presence actively impeded being
able to have the technical argument in a constructive fashion.

Would this have gone better without riba's involvement? Maybe not - but it
seems moderately unlikely to me that it could've gone worse.

tl;dr: If people take your words personally, it's generally easier to change
your words than everybody else. I'm far from claiming that I'm perfect at
this, but I find it deeply unfortunate that ribasushi seems to believe that
there's nothing to be gained from even trying.

(you will also find that I'm in that thread as well, and also somewhat
annoyed, but never resorted to accusations of deliberately ignoring the
problem nor to throwing about random bits of bolding to add negative
emotional content that is almost invariably counterproductive to achieving
a constructive result)

-- 
Matt S Trout - Shadowcat Systems - Perl consulting with a commit bit and a clue

http://shadowcat.co.uk/blog/matt-s-trout/   http://twitter.com/shadowcat_mst/

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