On Fri, 02 Aug 2024 at 11:35:54 +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> VERSION_CODENAME=trixie was added, and the problem as explained is
> that it's present in sid too. So the only identifier we have in sid,
> identifies it as trixie, which is categorically and unequivocally
> wrong.
When involved in a disagreement, please could you try to make an effort
to understand the point of view of the other side, rather than declaring
them to be categorically and unequivocally wrong? I think that would
lead to fewer people feeling that they're being shouted at and refusing
to engage with you, which is likely to result in more of the changes
you want to see actually being adopted.
Dismissing the other side's point of view as "just wrong" is a pattern
that I keep seeing in Debian, from multiple people, and frankly it's
exhausting. Even when I completely agree with you about the technical
content of what you're saying, it makes every disagreement into an
unpleasant interaction that drains my energy and motivation, and I know
that I'm not the only DD who is put off by the way relatively minor
disagreements escalate.
Normally when there's a non-obvious technical decision to be made,
"both sides" have a valid design principle that they're trying to follow,
and the essence of the decision is a value-judgement about which of the
two contradictory design principles is more important than the other
one (better cost/benefit ratio, defining cost as broadly as possible).
These are decisions that we need to make, but they shouldn't be a fight:
sometimes we have to agree to disagree, and sometimes we have to accept
that our reasons to want option A are outweighed by someone else's
reasons to want option B.
In this case, I think the two design principles might be:
- you think of sid as an independent rolling-release distribution in
its own right, an alternative to e.g. Arch Linux, and so you want to
label sid images/containers/chroots/etc. in a way that is consistent
with that point of view;
- Santiago thinks of sid as a tool to be used as part of the process of
making our next stable release, an alternative to e.g. Fedora Rawhide,
and wants to label sid images/etc. in a way that is consistent with
*that* point of view
and each of you is arguing in favour of the metadata that makes most
sense when you start from that point of view?
Of course, the real answer to "is sid a rolling release distribution or
is it a tool for making the next stable?" is "yes", so neither of those
points of view is completely wrong, but neither of them is the whole
story either.
I think that, as a project, we need a lot more willingness to frame
disagreements in terms of "I see your point, but I think my point is
more important", and a lot less "you're just wrong". All of us are
doing our best to make Debian the best possible Free operating system,
even if we don't always agree on precisely what that means.
smcv
not a TC member
