Re: [Gdbheads] Re: Feb's patch resolution rate

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Elena Zannoni <address@hidden> writes:

> Your proposal has a fundamental flaw.  Trusting that voting achieves
> its purpose means to trust that people are acting fairly and that
> everybody's opinion gets a fair chance based on technical merit.  Here
> you are, instead, openly stating that voting is about convincing
> people to be on your side, instead of believing that they can achieve
> an independent opinion on their own.  In the past you have actively
> lobbied against people behind their back, with mailing lists and
> weekly phone conferences set up for the purpose.  You also have
> admitted that you have personal grudges against Andrew.  Therefore I
> definitely don't trust that voting in this community is going to be
> fair.  I am not against voting per se, but here, I have my serious
> doubts about it.

I'm not sure that this is a fair criticism.  Of course voting is about
convincing people to be on your side.  That's why you vote: to decide
who has been more convincing.  That is not a fundamental flaw in Jim's
proposal; it's the point of the proposal.

You say that Jim doesn't believe that people "can achieve an
independent opinion on their own."  But when you go on to say that Jim
is influencing people in various nefarious ways, aren't you making the
same mistake?  People can make up their own minds no matter what Jim
says.  Jim and I used to work in the same office (and you did too) and
I never saw Jim exercising any hypnotic powers.

Personally, I wish that Andrew would spend more time convincing people
to be on his side.  I find his e-mail messages to be indirect and
elliptical, and he seems to avoid answering questions directly.  As I
said earlier today, the job of being a GNU maintainer is an inherently
political job.  And one aspect of being a politician is communicating
clearly.

Ian