[mb-users] Re: Open Letter to the MusicBrainz Community

[Robert Kaye]

On Aug 19, 2006, at 10:10 AM, Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
> I have to agree with this, but was this _really_ the reason for  
> removing
> Stefan's dev accounts? I could understand that (personally I wouldn't  
> solve it
> this way though). But the first mail you sent me sounded a little  
> differently.

  . . .

> No, it wasn't the tone, it was the reason(s). As I said, I could  
> understand
> doing so for e.g. using workflow he doesn't accept. But Rob said he  
> did so
> because "his actions are creating discord", which is something  
> completely
> different and something I will never agree to be a valid reason for  
> decisions
> like this.

Let me elaborate on the reasons why I did this. "Creating discord"  
captures a whole number of issues that I perceived:

1. Stefan is too passionate, which in turn raises emotions in the whole  
community. People that are normally calm (or people with normally  
acceptable behavior) get pushed over the edge into the unreasonable  
when they have to constantly bicker with Stefan. I perceived ripples of  
discord going through the community, with Stefan at the center.

2. Stefan needs to coworker. The time I had to spent working with  
Stefan ruled out the possibility of me doing any coding work or even  
really administering the non-profit. This created discord in my  
personal workflow, and thus my personal happiness about MB.

3. Stefan works too sloppily. I've got one concrete example:

http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/changeset/8235/mb_server/branches/ 
RELEASE_20060712-BRANCH/htdocs/comp/layout/sidemenu-panel-topvoters

I should've caught this mistake. I should've taken more time to review  
things before the release. But instead I took Stefan's word that things  
were ready and updated the site. The mason portions of the site refused  
to come back up and I was on the hot-seat to debug it. After 10 minutes  
of downtime and utter frustration I reverted back to a known good  
version. I literally had to read the entire patch from the original  
0712 branch to find the issue. What did this tell me? I could not trust  
Stefan to say that things were ready and that when I wanted to do an  
update that I would need to spend vastly more time convincing myself  
that things were in fact ready. Downtime and sloppy bug fixes also  
create discord in the community. Certainly in my well being.

4. Stress to settle conflicts. Now, we've agreed that I should stop  
doing this. Aweseome. But at the time this was a major strain on me.

These were my reasons -- some of them are no longer issues, some are.

The entire time I was in SF and wasn't at the conference I was thinking  
about these issues (not exactly relaxing, let me tell you). But I think  
a step in the right direction will be to create the community oversight  
system. Would it be a good idea to have this system take on the  
question if Stefan should get his dev privs back as its first task?

> --

--ruaok         Somewhere in Texas a village is *still* missing its  
idiot.

Robert Kaye     --     rob at eorbit.net     --    http://mayhem-chaos.net