Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Manners

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

> >   Tom, when one person says "you're difficult to communicate with",
> > they're
> > a crank".
>
> >   When the entire world says "you're difficult to communicate with",
> > you're
> > the crank.
>
>
> Guess what.  The entire world is not against me.   Not by a long shot.

  Saying you are difficult to communicate with is not the same thing
as being against you.


 Let be more bluntly specific.

  You have a communication problem. I am not the first, nor will I be
the last person to point this out. Your communication problem stems,
in my opinion, from you strongly identifying a person with an idea or
code. You then criticize the person, instead of the idea, which tends
to provoke the person, and make the discussion personal.

  This is very common among software engineers. Its a very common idiom
to say "Tom did this" instead of "Tom's code did this". While it seems
like a small difference, it becomes a large difference when there are
problems, because "Tom didn't do the right thing" is much more hurtful 
to
Tom then "tla didn't do the right thing".

> Some stuff matters more than naive assesments of what is polite,

 Naive assessments of what is polite? Wow.

 Do you see how you've insulted me? Was that necessary?

  Lack of courtesy would be bad enough in a commercial enterprise,
but in an open source project that strongly relies on volunteers,
its important to get along with the major contributors. By that
I don't mean me, I mean jblack.



 Pierce

P.S.

  I should confess, I used to be much worse then you are. That's part
of the reason I'm interfering now, is because I was alienating
people when I didn't need to. There were two reasons for that. One
was my general lack of health made me uncomfortable a lot of the time
and therefore more irritable. The other is the personalization issue
I mention above.