Res: Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo

[Kevin Kofler]

Peter Jones wrote:
> I'm sorry you don't like it, but you've had ample occasion to come up with
> a better idea, and you have roundly refused to make any attempt at doing
> so.

"I'm sorry you don't like my plate of Merde Provençale, but you've had ample 
occation to come up with a better recipe for feces, and you have roundly 
refused to make any attempt at doing so."

See the problem there? (Hint: the basic assumption that you want to eat sh*t 
in the first place!)

You were only interested in "better ideas" under a very narrow initial 
assumption which I don't share. Of course I was not interested in trying to 
coming up with "better ideas" under those conditions, as I don't believe 
that to be possible in the first place. You did not give any consideration 
to the fact that your initial premises may be broken and incorrect (which 
they happen to be).

> You keep saying that, and it just shows a complete disregard for testing
> in general. Asking people to test it and simply flag that they've done so
> with success (or not) is very much not bureaucracy.

I don't believe testing to be the answer to everything. It's far from 
infallible, it's also not the only possible form of QA. There are changes 
which don't need testing, for example if a patch was dropped because we 
thought it wasn't needed anymore, and it turns out the patch is still 
needed, readding the patch needs no testing whatsoever because the patch has 
ALREADY been tested, plus it's fixing a regression. This is why the latest 
qt update went out straight to stable. And no, testing did NOT catch the 
regression. Right after the update went stable, we got the report. You have 
to accept that most users will NOT try out a package until after it hits 
stable.

> We trust their intent and their ability, because that's reasonable. We
> don't trust that they never make mistakes, because that's insane. We all
> make mistakes. The karma system is an attempt to mitigate the damage when
> that (very frequent) eventuality occurs.

You need to prove that "very frequent" assertion. I don't see this as being 
true at all, quite the opposite. It almost never happens with the current 
system. Maintainers ALREADY use testing and keep feedback into account. Why 
do we need to FORCE them to? We should TRUST our maintainers!

        Kevin Kofler