On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 10:53 PM, Chris Bannister <cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 12:19:09AM +0900, Joel Rees wrote: >> On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 8:56 PM, Chris Bannister >> <cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz> wrote: >> > On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 03:09:24PM +0900, Joel Rees wrote: >> >> Well, yeah, but ask any marriage counselor what tends to happen when >> >> one partner decides arbitrarily what the other needs. >> > >> > What does a marriage counselor know about software development? You >> > should instead ask the marriage counselor what happens if one partner >> > confuses wants with needs. >> >> You're the one who decided to use marriage as a metaphor. It cuts both ways. > > It was you who started talking about marriage counselors.
I'd say that you opened the window to the comment, since you talked about the difference between perceptions of needs and wants in a marriage, and pointed out that, invariably, when there's an argument, at least one party in the argument insists that his views of needs is correct and the other's claims are just wants. Maybe that's not what you intended, but anyone who has tried to help friends or family when marriages start falling apart recognize the symptoms. Now, I don't know what the attitude towards getting professional help is in New Zealand. In America, when an argument about needs vs. wants on a single topic drags on for a year or more, friends usually suggest professional or semi-professional help. In Japan, admitting to seeking help seems to be a source of embarrassment, and suggesting it an insult. (But that view is changing a little bit, lately.) I refrained from this allegory before, but I'll go ahead and use it: When one partner decides that a new technique "needs" to be experimented with, and the other is not sanguine to the experience, in the US, it can be cause for criminal rape charges. If that's too close for comfort, consider this: parents in the US who force their ideologies on their children can be charged with criminal abuse. Really, the whole idea that we have some chattel relationship between the devs and the users in debian is entirely inappropriate, just as it is in families. A four-four draw in the technical committees should have been a call to open the discussion to a wider user base, not a call for one member of the committee to make an arbitrary decision. Things are not functioning correctly "up" there, even if we ignore the Social Contract. Technical issues cannot be claimed to be inherently superior to social issues in any system that is in regular, direct use by humans, especially when such technical claims become the basis for unilateral action. Such claims are indication of hubris at best, and blind ego in this case. (Compare the abusive parent or spouse.) Now, in truth, I picked up Fedora only because I was having trouble understanding the unwritten rules in play in openbsd. Couldn't read the docs and come to the same conclusions as the others on the misc@ list, so I decided I needed a bit of education, and debian was suggested. But we were using RedHat at work, so I picked up Fedora. I dropped Fedora and came over to debian because of the systemd business. I've seen power abuse in political processes in local governments, and I recognized both inappropriate political processes and abuses in play as I watched it play out. But that was okay, because I needed to pick up debian. And now I'm motivated to return to openbsd, which is also all to the good. I've got an old laptop up right now, and am running through the afterboot man page and finding myself understanding it much better than fifteen years ago. And the init system was one of the places in openbsd that I could follow the examples but couldn't really understand what I was doing. But I understand it now. I can see the reasons for things that were not at all obvious back then. (And I find myself wondering why on earth anyone would want to use anything so redundant and overblown as systemd.) I could say more, but I think it would not be constructive at this point. -- Joel Rees Be careful where you see conspiracy. Look first in your own heart. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAAr43iNXb_osgn5ask3F_StkMHwB6j4=mgrlwjzvky7jf-w...@mail.gmail.com
