On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 01:52:11AM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote: > Hello world, > > As you all know there's been an expulsion process (following the > procedure outlined in [1]) running, with Sven Luther as the > nominee. We've finally reached a decision. *Please* read the full mail > before you reply, as we will give detailed reasons why we decided the > way we have. Take a minute (or hour) to think about your reply before > you actually send it. (Something that could be done more often by all of > us).
Joerg, James, NM-ctte, fellow Debian Developers, Debian Users, World at large, ... You will find here my reply to your expulsion procedure, including mention of the many irregularities and non-respect of the procedure, your non-respect for the strong opposition of a vaste (75 to 7) majority of DDs in the discussion on debian-private, and your total lack actually seeing the complete set of responsabilities and this and trying to come to a fair ruling. I wish you would either take back this decision, or be fair and extend it to Frans Pop, Anthony Towns, and Steve McIntyre, who share in no small part the responsability of more than one year of strife and infighting for which i was summarily judged here. Profundly hurt, Sven Luther -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 About the expulsion procedure : =============================== Plan : 0) Summary 1) What the procedure does say 2) What happened 3) Supporters / Opposers of the expulsion 4) The content of the complaints 5) Conclusion 0) Summary, for the impatients - ------------------------------ - The expulsion discussion on -private showed a overwhelmingtratio of 75 to 7 people opposed to the expulsion, the majority of them strongly opposed, and various who said they would leave debian if the expulsion has gone through. The DAMs did ignore most of those, chosing only to quote non-attributed passages of the pro-expulsion in length. - The expulsion procedure was shady at best, not reaching quorum, not being dismissed after the 2 weeks of the initial request as per the procedure. - both Anthony's original request of 3 months ban as well as the renewal of interest in seconding the request on february 21 coincide with the end of the DPL election and my DPL candidacy. - i am not alone responsible of these events, and was under continuous agression since fall 2005, principally by Frans Pop. Anthony Towns and Steve McIntyre where acting as DPL and mediator, but where fully in favour of Frans Pop since the begining, and thus share equal responsability in the events reproached to me. As thus, all three of them should suffer the same penalty as i am facing 1) What the procedure does say - ------------------------------ First, the expulsion procedure was illegal, and as thus the final decision on it is not valid. The procedure is described in : http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/08/msg00005.html And lists in step 2 (expulsers search seconds) : The time limit for this step is 2 weeks. If there are not Q supporters after 2 weeks, this process ends. And the following part of step 3 (informing the expulsee) : If the nominator gets enough supporters we will write a mail to the nominee about it, including the names and reasons of all people involved. Furthermore, on step 1 (nomination), it is written : We reserve the right to reject any nomination if we think the nomination will not survive the following process or is caused by animosity between two developers, like simple packaging disagreements. 2) What happened - ---------------- So, this are the rules set forward by the DAMs themselves, and now let's look at what happened : On January 3, Anthony Towns puts in a request for my expulsion to the DAMs. So, this is the official step 1. It is clear that the expulsion request does not fall under the cover of a technical abuse of debian ressources, but result from a (largely gotten out of hand) animosity between two developers (namely Frans Pop and myself), so the DAMs could have rejected the procedure at this point, but let's look into this later. The step 2 starts on January 3, and has a 2 week duration, which brings us to january 17, at which time i should have been informed of the request, as per step 3 cited above. This was not the case, instead : On January 5 or 6, Joerg Jaspert contacted me per irc, and then phoned me, telling me about the expulsion request (i have some mails requesting your expulsion in my mailbox, and i need to do something about them), and we discussed, and i was asked to talk only about technical issues on debian lists, and no more try to solve the social mess which lead to this problem. During the months of february, i posted only twice on debian lists, the first time when i declared me as DPL candidate (and debian-vote had explicitly been declared non-bannable during the thread in december), and a second time, due to a mistake of my part in the week preceding FOSDEM, when i was trying to organise for a TV for the booth. On February 24, Joerg Jaspert, acting DAM in this issue, sent me an email which never reached me. On February 25 afternoon, i had a quick talk with James Troup at FOSDEM, the second DAM, who didn't say a word to me about this. On January 26 evening i finally received the expulsion request mail. So, apart from the lost occasion to solve this in RL on an occasion where many Debian Developers where present, 54 days passed between the expulsion request and the informing the expulsee step. => This is the first flagrant irregularity of the procedure. So, i was distressed and hurt because even if i respected the two month ban, before it was even ended, and while i made effort to bring hardware for the debian booth, the expulsion was still going forward, despite me following the recomendations of Joerg Jaspert. So, now on to the content of the expulsion request : Accordying to Jaspert's mail, Q was set to 16 : Current Developer Count = 1016 Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 15.9373774505092 K min(5, Q ) = 5 Quorum (3 x Q ) = 47.8121323515277 This means 16. Step 2 had a timeline of 2 weeks, end was 21 February 2007. All together we got 18 supporters, which means we are above Q and have to go on. Here, we see for the first time the date of February 21 included, and the 2 week timeline was explicitly mentioned, which would have put the begining of the expulsion procedure on February 7. It is interesting to notice that i had officially declared myself as DPL candidate on February 6, so it is now evident that the expulsion request was a direct reaction to my DPL candidacy, and this procedure a way to get ride of a candidate. Well, maybe there is another explanation, but i fail to find one. So, the expulsor was Anthony Towns and the supporters where : Manoj Srivasta ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Michael Bank ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Martin Michlmayr ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] John Goerzen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Frans Pop ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Andres Salomon ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Joey Hess ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geert Stappers ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jeroen von wolffelaar ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas bushnell) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Theodore Tso (tytso.mit.edu) Well, first, a very strange way to name people by their email addresses, and not their full name, but well. We have 18 supporters, so, barely 2 more than the bare minimum. There, a first suprise can be found, none except the expulsion request from Anthony is dated, nor signed by their authors. => This may be a second irregularity, how can those non gpg-signed mails be evidence ? A second surprise follows immediately, the first mail is not Anthony's expulsion request, but Andres Salomon's expulsion request from start of march 2006, which had been taken back by Andres himself before it could go further. Furthermore, it contains various lies or innacuracies, but we will go into this at a later point. => The supporter mail from Andres is not a response to Anthony's expulsion request, but predates it by 10 months, and has been retired, so it cannot be accepted accordying to the DAMs own procedure. There is a supporter mail from Andres farther down, so his supporting is still valid. Then follows Anthony's expulsion procedure, which he clearly was the result of animosity due to an exchange i had with him during these days, and which asks for a suspension of 3 months (which would coincidentally have ended around the end of the 2007 DPL election, of which Anthony is candidate). We have then a bunch of mails, without dates, and which show evidence of dating being supporters of Andres Salomon's expulsion request from marsch 2006 : Decklin Foster : From: Decklin Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: removal of svenl from the project To: Andres Salomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thomas Bushnell : From: Thomas Bushnell BSG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: removal of svenl from the project To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... I second Andres request with respect to Sven Luther. Theodore Ts'o : From: Theodore Ts'o <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: removal of svenl from the project To: Andres Salomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... I hereby second Andres' expulsion request of Sven Luther. My reason So, this makes 3 supporters who are not supporting Anthony's request, but Andres request which was withdrawn, and are thus not valid. This brings the supporter down to 15, which is one less than Q, and makes the procedure irrecevable. => This is yet another blatant error in the procedure. As said, there are no further dates on the other mails, appart from the one from Michael Banck, which contains : From: Michael Banck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Sven Luther To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 02:23:21PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: And suggests that Manoj Srivastava immediately replied to Anthony's original proposal (the difference in dates can probably be accounted for timezones, with Anthony in Australia, and Manoj in the USAs). The other element, is a private irc discussion with Jeroen, where he told me he supported the request on March 21. I noticed this, and was deeply disturbed, and asked the DAMs about a clarification concerning the dates, as well as a copy of the gpg-signed supporter mails, complete with headers. I repeated this request on irc, and others have later asked for the dates (Pierre Habouzit for example, but there where others), and where greeted only by the silence of the DAMs. => This tends to prove that the DAMs have something to hide, and knew of the irregularity of the procedure, and chose to ignore this fact. So, on a purely procedurial basis, the expulsion request is not valid, and the DAMs decision is thus invalid. This is particularly troubling seeing how Joerg Jaspert chose to say : From: Joerg Jaspert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Info about "Procedure for the expulsion of Debian Developers" Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:35:19 +0100 Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ... ok, from following the huge amount of mails in -private, and the way less large amount of mails to da-manager, it is obvious that not everyone understands the procedure. ... What the procedure gets us is a.) a way for every DD to ask the DAMs to (maybe) use their right to expel someone and to know what happens from there on, and b.) makes sure there is at least a minimum level of support, by requiring that much (Q) supporters, and also c.) gives us DAMs a good source of input for arguments for or against an expulsion, by allowing both sides to send in their statements and to allow all Developers to also do that. So, it is clear that Joerg is adhering and even defending the procedure as a way to judge on such issues, and it is thus even more troublesome that the procedure is not followed. Furthermore, Anthony Towns himself said on debian-private and in private mail : For this particular case, I don't have an answer; like I said on -private, I'd assumed the suspension request had folded for lack of support by mid-January, and apart from my posts to -private which I assume you've already seen, haven't had anything to do with it since then. Which, coming from the original expulsor, further confirms the irregularity of the expulsion procedure. Finally, the judgement of the DAMs take into account events that happened after the 2 weeks discussion period, including an angry mail from Eirich, which he posted in anger because i didn't reply to him anymore on irc, even though i told him i was going to bed (i told him good night and went to bed). => This is a further breach of the procedure. Finally, during the expulsion period, Micah did take back his support, thus further diminishing the amount of original supporters. 3) Supporters / Opposers of the expulsion - ----------------------------------------- Supporters : 7 Opposers : 75 4) The content of the complaints - -------------------------------- Here again, there are various very troublesome points. First, Anthony Towns, the expulsor, and Steve McIntyre, a supporter, are both DPL candidates, Anthony is the DPL, and as thus was asked to mediate on the dispute between myself and Frans Pop. This mediation was doomed to failure from the start, since Anthony Towns was, for whatever reason, biased and fully took position with Frans Pop, despite numerous evidence to the contrary. Anthony: "You first have to recognize that everything is your fault" Anthony: "I acknowledge that i know nothing about mediation" Anthony: "You deserve better than that for your contributions to Debian, you deserve worse than it for the way you've treated Frans and everyone else who's tried to help you over the past year and beyond that." Anthony: "Ultimately, it's because we tolerate such hate and hurt. You're not remotely alone in being attacked in spite of your contributions, but at least you're not getting called 'Satan himself'" Anthony: "Ultimately, because we're a bunch of idiots who don't know how to get along with each other." So, here, Anthony does two things, he recognizes that he did a bad job at the mediation, that he doesn't know anything about it, but also still considers that Frans is fully right, and that i should fully accept that all the problems where my fault, despite clear evidence otherwise. So, we had a social problem, nothing new there, it happened because there was a clash between individuals of strong personality, as is often the case, and are often found in the free software community and in debian in particular. I got involved into this because i was passionated about debian, wanted the best technical solutions for it, and when i wanted to *DISCUSS* the problems and potential technical solutions, i became the target of incessant attacks from a small sub-group of debian. This really started with the vancouver disaster in spring 2005, where many people participated in passionate debates on debian-devel, and i was severly insulted, and it started again in fall 2005, where i had to deal with Manoj and Jonas, who suddenly became active at the fringes of the kernel team, in order to get a solution out for the devfs obsolescence and the initrd-tools dependency. During this time, i was faced by the continual attacks and insults of Manoj (FUCK YOU) and jonas, but in spite of that we managed, after i invested a lot of full time work and was able to harness the effort of the whole team, in the same-day-upload of the 2.6.14 kernel, with generic support for various ramdisk-generators. During the same time, i was under regular attack from Frans and Joey Hess, because i wanted to prolong the work we had done with the passage to the single source package kernel infrastructure, to allow us to do single or few days uploads of a full new d-i, compared to the whole month or more it was taking previously. Another clash was when i supervised Xavier Oswald's internship, on a project to create a d-i technology based ghost like tool, which would also have yielded a nicer graphical partitioner for d-i. In both those cases, the d-i leadership opposed me because they feared to lose control over d-i, and rejected ideas and improvement out of hand without going into any argumentation, and going agressive when this was pointed out to them. Despite this, I worked side by side with Frans at the extremadura d-i meeting, and meet him on friendly terms at FOSDEM. I later went to the erkelenz event, were i meet Jonas, and told him, about an RC bug which he had left open since december "let's take a few minutes, investigate the issue, and fix the bug". I had to hear him explain to me in a 30 minute discussion growing ever more agitated that no, he should not even look into the problem, because he was afraid it would break non-official kernels. This was a bit hallucinating to me, since well, what does it cost to look into it ? So, i backed down, and even went after Jonas when he left the room to have a few friendly words, so we would part in good terms. A month later or so, the RC bug was still not fixed, and the underlying problem was still present, and nothing serious was done, except try hack over hack to solve this. So, i decided to investigate, and quickly found the cause in the source code itself. This resulted in four consecutive days, where i tried to be positive and constructive, and bring the matter forward each morning, but around the middle of the afternoon, it degenerated again. But i made efforts four consecutive days, to no avail. In the end, the bug was fixed accordying to my suggestions, but i was not cited in the changelog. During that discussion, i happened to be so enraged that i said a few words which where misplaced, and which Andrew Salomon immediately publicized on debian-vote in the middle of the DPL election, and then asked for my expulsion. During this period, i also learned that my mother had terminal cancer, which hit me particularly, because she lived on the other side of the world, and i rarely saw her. This may give some hints, altough not excuse, why i reacted so badly at that time, and ever since then. So, let's go back to Andres claim of back then : 1) He said he tried to discuss with me at debconf'05 in helsinki, and that i was angry and agressive. I have no remembrance of this, and all to the contrary, i remember debconf'05 as one of the greatest moments of the kernel team, where we even all went to dinner once together. I may have disagreed with Andrew on technical basis, but i was at most passionate about my solution, and not angry and agressive. Furthermore, nobody of the kernel team said anything about this to me, back then, or later on. 2) He said that i proved agressive and insulting to users and the upstream kernel maintainers. This is just a plain lie, altough i did rise the issue of the non-free firmware on LKML, and some took it badly, but others have said that my words of back then where mostly humble and correct. I *NEVER* was rude to a user, even clueless newbies or otherwise, and always tried to be helpful. 3) He had no objection to Manoj telling me to "FUCK YOU", but when i said something similar or milder to jonas, he immediately went ballistic. So, Andrew didn't say a word about my behaviour and how it affected him, and never tried to discuss this with me, until he went for the expulsion, without following the procedure. Anyway, with the illness of my mother, and because i was being wronged and hurt on the emails exchange, i decided to stop reading all mailing lists except debian-powerpc, and even this one occasionally. On the night of marsch 26 or so, after my mother almost died, without proper medical care, all alone in a foreign country, in gloomy surrounding, i needed to take my mind into something else, and went to read debian-powerpc. I noticed that some users encountered a problem, which was due to a d-i buildd problem on the powerpc buildd i hosted at home, half the world away. I made a hasty guess at the cause, and forwarded the reply to debian-boot, which should be hable to handle the issue. I got an immediately angry response from Frans Pop, who had faced the same buildd problem earlier on x86, and had not transmitted the info to other d-i buildd maintainers, to which after a short exchange, i sent an email, where i *BEGGED* frans to be cool with me with regard to the stressy situation i faced personnally. The next day, i was receiving more agression from Frans, and was harrased until i wrote the infamous "i will no more be the lead d-i powerpc porter" mail. On which he jumped and immediately tried to find replacement for me (Colin Watson agreed to use his powerbook as d-i buildd, even though he had no time, and a notebook is not the adequate solution for this). I wished him good luck, and listed all the issues i was aware off, and went of to arrange for oxygen, for an acompanying doctor, and for medical support at the miami airport, all that without any help from the insurances. The trip back was ghastly, and my mother died the day after she returned to france, but at least she could see her mother, and part of the family again (she missed my two younger brothers though). So, after the funeral, and some time to recovery, i turned my attention again to debian, and looked at what i could use to get me working again, noticed that the d-i powerpc daily builds had been broken since weeks during my absence, and decided to investigate and fix it. I then discovered that Frans and the d-i leadership had not only removed me as powerpc lead porter, had not done a good job at handling the port and let it be broken, but also removed my d-i svn access, which in see had no reason to be. And this without telling me. Anther round of flames and agression from both sides followed, and i decidd early on that the other side was not acting reasonably on this, and went for the DPL as mediator. A bit later I was assigned Steve McIntyre as mediator, and an exchange continued. But after a few days or weeks, there was nothing happening, and the mediators did bring nothing back from the other party, and uniquely tried to make me talk to get me to accept the issue. I even made a reasonable compromise proposal : - I get svn ci right back, but only work on those areas nobody else is interested in, like the prep or apus ports (broken back then). - I don't post on debian-boot, and don't try to discuss technical things, and in general don't bother the d-i leadership in any way. This was a proposal that seemed reasonable (even Steve Langasek commented such when asked), but was at first not even acknowledged by the mediators. I insisted some, but to no avail, either because Frans rejected it out of the hand, or the mediators didn't judge it worthy to pursue, to this time i don't know for sure. Then some time passed, without movement or news, and when i asked what was going on, Anthony suddenly had decided that i was wrong in everything and that frans should be the judge of my good behaviour, and review all my d-i contributions. This was a receipt for disaster, if ever i saw one, but it was the final judgement of the DPL, so ... I had trouble coming to gripes with it, but after some time, i decided to play with the rules. This ended in patches being ignored in the BTS, me loosing changes due to svn/BTS/package synchro problems, and more, with Frans even blaming me about not providing patches i had lost because of this state, and proving agressive and insulting against me without provocation in bug reports. But as said, what else was expected from such a setup. After a few months of trying this, it was no more acceptable, and i was out of my mind trying to see what else i could do, and during this time two things happened : - i was asked to prove the points i reproached to frans. - i asked for help on irc, and was proposed to try it not with email, but on a blog or on the wiki. Given these two facts, i decided, not to dwell on the past, but to prove my positive and constructive contribution to debian, which you can all still see on the wiki. I listed all my (20 or 30) patches i submitted accordying to the rules set by the DPL, and which where applied, or not yet. (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FransPopAndOthersVs.SvenLutherIssue/SvenLuther) I ended with : An last a personal message to Frans, remember when we where in Extremadura, we had a good time, and we worked side by side. I seriously lament that it all degenerated like it did. I certainly have my part of responsability in this, but i passed though times, as you know. Let's put pride and arrogance and remembrance of past hurts aside, and let's again work on d-i all together, as it should be. To this followed a nasty episode which almost broke me down, where chealer disspaeared the wiki page, and played a ugly game with me, but was promptly but to his place. The pages evolved, and where immediately followed by odious responses from Holger Levensen and Geert Stappers (taken away in shame since then), and an agressive note from Joey Hess, where he threatened to stop all d-i contribution if i was allowed back. Later Frans Pop, when asked about the wiki page on irc, said : 01:15 <fjp> Yes, I agree it is going on too long. But start acknowledging that you are the base cause of the whole situation and no joeyh, not aj, not vorlon, not me. 01:18 <fjp> My honest opinion of it: the biggest load of self-satisfied and self-centered crap I've ever seen Since then, i have made numerous proposals of reconciliation, which where all rejected in the same tone, upto being told to "FUCK YOU". (I was also told by frans during this time that he was provoking me on purpose, which put a bit more light to the mail from eddy petrisor earlier on on debian-boot, where he expressed himself disgusted on how frans had provoked me and pushed me to extremes. Clearly some conversation happend of which i was not aware off inside the d-i team. Interesting to notice that later on when eddy petrisor made some critic of the usability of the g-i partitioner, he was threatened to follow the same way as myself if i didn't behave). During this time, another event happened, namely the non-free firmware issue. Within the kernel team, we where trying to handle this, in the followup of when i contacted broadcom over the tg3 licence back in 2005, and Frederik Schueler and myself and a few others where preparing a proposal, slowly as we where quite busy then. This was in the context of various kernel team members menacing to leave debian if the firmware was removed, and John and Thomas being for their removal, and Manoj threatening to fork the kernel tree, and in general feeling superior because he used to be kernel maintainer back in the 90s, well, being Manoj as we all know him. At this time, when we informed Steve Langasek about our work, he decided to go solo, with a proposal, which despite my warnings, managed, in a repetition of the vancouver proposal, to bring a huge outcry and flamewar, including Steve Langasek accusing Manoj of vote manipulation, over the presence or absence of rationale in the actual vote text. Despite this, managed to speak with all parties in this, both John and Thomas and Maks and Kyle and others, and kind of got them all to agree that we could not solve the non-free firmware issue for etch, but where going to work on this later on. The proposal Frederik had coined was not perfect, but got enough seconds, and i asked for it to be put to vote. During this time, Anthony Town, as DPL, asked me to recall my call to vote, in order to find a largely consensual GR, in the already mined situation. I did try to do so, and the resulting proposal was indeed consensual, and would have allowed to be a base for negoatiation with hardware vendors, like we did with tg3 and broadcom, and still release etch in time, without the 6 additional months of work needed by the d-i team to properly handle the non-free firmware (ironically, this was in august, and we could just as well have done this correctly, and avoided the flamewar, and would still have been ready for the release :). But Manoj proposed a better wording to Frederik's proposal, which under the cover of esthetic changes subtly changed its wording to mean the opposite of what was intented, and then hurried the election in order to stop the consensual proposal to go out, and resulted in a vote that the RMs said they would not respect before the vote is even ended. So, this was a case, where i participated heavily in the discussion, but under considerable stress, and if i flamed a bit, and was bitter at the end over the result, this is only understandable, and things would maybe have worked out better if Steve Langasek had not decided his solo play. At the same time Debian was under another ugly flamewar over paying or not the RMs, in which ugly words and menaces where exchanged, and in which i had no party, apart from a single contribution if my memory serves me well. So, forward again, end of november, the situation with d-i was still messy, i was still being agressed and provoked by frans, and i was still over-reacting and posting in return, even though i often made positive contributions and more proposals of reconciliation, including a proposal to frans to meet in live at FOSDEM and solve this in person, which was not replied. At that time Fabio, agreed to mediate again, and i had big hopes in this. At that time i had forgotten any hope of getting svn ci access again, and only wanted that frans stoped bashing me in bug reports, and in general being agressive with me, and that we meet at FOSDEM to solve the issue. Anthony Towns didn't properly delegate Fabio as mediator, as he was asked, and Frans did say he would only abide by the mediation if it suited him. I on the contrary said that i would abide by the mediation no matter what. There passed a few weeks which where vastly improven, but suddenly after christmas, Fabio ruled that i was the cause of all this (citing a single exchange on irc with Manoj, over some bug report against kernel-package), and that i should be banned. A discussion followed, on which i was asked to see a psychiatrist, and which then lead to interesting sub-discussions about how to solve social problems in debian, including the formation of a social comittee, in which i participated. Frans did at that time say he had taken "good new year resolution" and would want to know nothing of me, and Anthony Towns repeteadly asked me to hold to the ban, which i did in january, except for 3 cases : - a discussion with a user who had problems booting debian on PReP machine,s whic i had started before fabio posted. - when i posted my intention to be DPL, which triggered the expulsion procedure renewal. - a mistake i made when trying to arrange a TV for the FOSDEM debian booth. One interesting thing in Anthony's request for my suspension still : - in the mediation he proposed, i was explictly allowed to do NMUs of d-i packages i maintained. - me doing this lead to two agressions from Frans, where the NEW handling software was modified to stop me from making d-i uploads. - Anthony cites this as example of my bad behaviour, while this is something he himself proposed, and said the would support me in it. On January 6, Joerg Jaspert called me, and after FOSDEM the expulsion procedure started, even before the ban ended. During the discussion period of two weeks, i behaved mostly correctly, despite the agressive and ofen insulting attacks against me from the expulsion supporters, on the contrary, Frans, and a few others of the expulsers, replied with very agressive and hateful replies. During the expulsion period, an overwhelming amount of DDs voiced their opposition to the expulsion. After the discussion period was over, we stayed for over 10 days without any news from the DAMs, with the emotional stress this imposed on me, upto the final expulsion. 5) Conclusion In conclusion to all this, there are various things that become evident : - The expulsion procedure was not respected, and full of shadowy parts. It was not handled in transparency, and there is no proof that this is something else than the will of the DAMs (and i know Joerg spoke against the expulsion). - A vast majority of DDs where opposed to the expulsion (75) as opposed to the 18 seconders and only 7 people who further supported them during the discussion, and at least one of the supporters regretted his original support and took it back. - I was under constant agression from a very small sub-group of DDs, who are known for their own vocal attitude and strong character, and happen to be very near the ruling body of debian (or cabal or whatever you want to call it). The fact that i was under personal stress did not help me there, nor the fact that i was mostly isolated, since most people disliking their behaviour stayed silent. - Frans Pop shares as much responsability for these events than me, he rejected all compromise proposals, acted very badly himself in these events, yet never acknowledged that he may have maybe a part of fault, and despite having said he didn't want to have anything to do with me in january, he was apparently foremost in those searching for seconds for the expulsion. - Anthony Towns and to a lesser degree Steve McIntyre, share full responsability for these events, by refusing to take their responsability seriously, and because they didn't even try to mediate, and where from the begining fully in favour of Frans Pop, and are so yet to this day. - The decision did nothing to address the real problem, and did not even stop its symptom. The only result was to humiliate me more and punish me for my "bad" behaviour. As thus it was a bad decision. Furthermore it declared i had reverted to the old mode because i participated in a conversation while the decision was over-due, without even checking the content of those mails, and it accepted further accusation without (Eirich mail) without even further investigation about its veracity and circunstances So, all in all, i was unjustly and illegally expulsed, for a behaviour whose cause is shared between me, and others. To be fair, the punishment should be applied to all involved, and i thus ask that an equal sentence should be applied to Frans Pop, Anthony Towns, and Steve McIntyre. Profundly hurt, Sven Luther -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGDbwn2WTeT3CRQaQRAicJAKCJXLE0EW9nhxvzzXkshdFjiODD0QCfRDQv S35n7DpZEqqi7C2CK3k72xo= =hfau -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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