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It’s funny when …

… someone who should know English better than me tries to change the meaning of a phrase. I was reported that ciaranm considered my post a direct attack but seems like either my knowledge of English is so poor that I said a different thing than I meant, or he’s trying again to make me pass for a fool changing what I said.

In my post you can find the following phrase:

Seems like many people get a strange idea by reading mailing list, **mostly because of Ciaran’s claims that happens pretty often**, that if you’re upstream of a given software you cannot be downstream (as in ebuild maintainer), because you “remove a layer of QA”.

the bold is added now.

At this point, did I ever said that Ciaran said that you cannot be both downstream and upstream maintainer? No I didn’t. I just said that people get that as a strange idea. I think Alexis (aballier) can confirm, as he’s one of the people who had this idea (we talked in #gentoo-media about him taking care of XdTV as I cannot do that myself anymore, and he being not sure because he’s also part of upstream). I had similar discussions with other friends of mine, more interested on the idea itself rather than the actual application of it (as they aren’t Gentoo developers nor upstream developers), but that’s about it. I just wanted to say what I thought about it.

But he tried once again to change my words so that I look an idiot and an asshole… I think the only thing he’s going to do now is looking himself more like a moron.

Funny thing that he’s also aggregated in Gentooish channels, when he seems only to despise anything going on in Gentoo if it’s not done by his protegés..

Ciaran, I used to think you just had bad social skills but good technical skills.. but you’re just making a fool out of yourself lately, please start to consider more appropriate hobbies.. fishing, woodwork, killing ants with a stick…

Comments 11
  1. While I hate to take Ciaran’s side on this one (and I can assure you I’m not one of his proteges ;)The main bulk of your sentence (as interpreted by me) is:”Seems like many people get a strange idea by reading mailing list that if you’re upstream of a given software you cannot be downstream (as in ebuild maintainer)”You give the reasoning behind this “strange idea” by appending:”because you “remove a layer of QA””If you take that understanding and then look at:”mostly because of Ciaran’s claims that happens pretty often”The only thing it can really be applied to in this context is the _how_ with regard to people getting a strange idea.Rereading it again (a few times), I think you might have meant that people often get strange ideas from Ciaran’s claims but not necessarily that the “upstream/downstream maintainer is bad” idea originates from Ciaran or that he even supports it. Is that correct? If so, just adding a full stop and fixing the resulting grammar would have been enough for readers to distinguish the two points.Anyway, not really writing in defense(sp?) of Ciaran as his response (which I haven’t read) was probably not written with any empathy; just writing to bestow on you my poor English teaching skills in the hope that you might benefit some. 😉

  2. Heh.. I should have read Ciaran’s post first. ;)Either way, the flow of logic when reading the sentence still counts. It implies that Ciaran agrees with the strange ideas.

  3. please guys. write mails, talk to each other. why does this have to be public? can’t you try to settle your differences via a more private channel? you’re both representatives of gentoo – and you’re putting our favourite distro in a bad light bickering like that.

  4. koomi, actually, he’s representative of what I don’t want Gentoo to be: a slimy “watch your words” kind of distribution.Jason, what I meant is that the mails ciaranm said about the layer of QA are often misunderstood, and people get strange ideas. I never got into what ciaranm said or thinks, I don’t really want to know that, but I was trying to clear my opinion about the ideas of people reading him.(I was questioned if I shouldn’t have given up xine-lib already for instance).

  5. Generally speaking, ciaranm can be an asshole for no good reason. However, this time I think he is completely justified.When I read your original post, I had interpreted your sentence exactly like Ciaran did: I thought you meant that “Ciaran is telling people that they cannot be both upstream and a downstream maintainer”. Reading your post again, I now see how you could interpret it in many ways, but I would say that most English-speaking people would see the same meaning that Ciaran did.So Ciaran wrote a rebuttal, saying that he never said what he though you said he said (whew). In his post, Ciaran was polite, did not flame, and was respectful to you and your xine-lib work.And what do you do then? You insult Ciaran in public, say that he acts like a fool, and claim that he has bad technical skills. And without any justification at all! Yes, Ciaran’s social skills are “famous”. But please explain, how does his blog post show that he has (or doesn’t have) technical ability? IMHO, Ciaran’s post was perfectly understandable and your insults and flames are uncalled for.Anyway, these stupid arguments between devs are not helping Gentoo stay the best distro on earth.

  6. Alex, please look at his final phrase:

    But hey, attacking a straw man is far easier than responding to what I really said.

    That is what pissed me off. He tries to make *me* look like the one attacking, instead he seems to find me in error everything I do…Just look at his bitching about asneeded support…

  7. Ah, the truth comes out. You’re pissed off because I called you out on your mistakes with as-needed, and you feel the need to up your standing by bashing me in public.Frankly, I’m amazed you managed to screw it up. It’s so easy to do!

  8. No, I’m pissed off that your egocentric nature make you misrepresent the things. The fact that you _still_ try to see an attack from me to you about this just show that this time I was right.About the asneeded thing, I still think that _if_ there is a bug, you should have reported it correctly, as you didn’t, seems to me you just want to bitch about people trying to find solutions to problems that does not require strange engineering methods.As Mike also said, if you think it’s broken, tell that on binutils mailing list… and if you know the behaviour is correct, and you’re relying on a behaviour that might not always be the same, just force the bloody behaviour as you need it to be, although you cannot change the reality we leave on, you *can* change the asneeded behaviour in ld….

  9. Looks like you still don’t understand the as-needed issue. There is no binutils bug. It behaves exactly as the documentation says it does. The bug is in how users are being encouraged to use a flag that, like -ffast-math, breaks correct code. Making applications add –no-as-needed is no more sensible than making them add -fno-fast-math.Perhaps you should read the explanation, rather than assuming that you know everything about the issue…

  10. I know the issue pretty well, and remains that –as-needed is *way* different from -fast-math, but maybe you still don’t understand that when *one* package fails out of every other thing… well, it’s probably a package’s fault.It’s like saying that as -fomit-frame-pointer can break some packages in strange ways (like libtorrent/rtorrent), you shouldn’t suggest it to users.Yes it’s *the same thing* now.Maybe you should think about this in a less egocentric way and understand that you has to consider the pro and cons in an objective way.

  11. I’m sorry, that sentence means exactly what ciaranm took it to mean, there’s no way around it.

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