Dear friends, fellow users and contributors to Devuan.
I have come to a point of personal crisis with regards to my involvement
in Devuan. I have given a great deal of time to bringing Devuan to
where it is today. Of late have my efforts have been largely in the
background in maintaining the build system as well as advocacy, and
helping to maintain some packages, and working towards adding support
for the ppc64el architecture particularly for the new TalosII hardware.
Recent events such as the fallout from the April 1 joke, which I
perceived it as a threat to Devuans image particularly with respect to
the appearance of security, and my poorly expression of those concerns
led me to be at odds with some of my fellow contributors and caretakers.
In particular I contributed to making another valued member, and a
fellow valuable contributor to Devuan, feel that he could no longer find
joy in contributing to Devuan any further resulting in his leaving our
community. I have apologised for this and continue to regret not having
found a better mechanism for expressing my concerns in a more
constructive way.
The latest issue at hand and the one precipitating this personal crisis
is with respect to the failure of ci.devuan.org. In this matter I took
actions that although were done in good faith and with all due care,
resulted in exacerbating an already broken server by trying to reboot it
an action which failed and left the server broken and inaccessible. I
rebooted under the assumption that the person that hosts that server for
us would reasonably be available to attend to it if it in the unlikely
event it failed to boot. I was wrong and should have checked he was
available first.
I am now at the point where given this latest assault on my character
and contributions by Jaromil, that I must honestly question whether I
continue to be useful to this community and Devuan as a distribution.
It is now up to you to decide whether or not I should be holding such a
venerable positions as caretaker, infrastructure maintainer and
developer, and package maintainer of many Devuan packages remains
justifiable and acceptable to this community.
My reason for bringing this to the attention of the broad community is
because Jaromil, one of my fellow caretakers has repeatedly taken
extreme exception to my actions and communications to the extent where
he has:
- called for my stepping down as caretaker at least 3 times.
- implied that I am incompetent in my administration of the devuan
infrastructure I have been co-maintaining for the last 3 or 4 years, in
particular the build system and until recently the packaging systems.
- claimed that I act with impunity and entirely disregard the need for
consultation on major decisions.
- threatened me in private emails to wage war against me and destroy my
reputation in this community and by implication the broader ICT, linux
and open source communities within which I operate and make my living.
and many other things.
Therefore, I feel that unless the broad community of users and
developers of Devuan continue to have and express confidence in my
abilities to continue to be a caretaker and valued contributor to
Devuan, that I must indeed step down as caretaker and cease contributing
to this project as per Jaromils repeatedly expressed desires.
I am extremely sad at having reached this point and recognize that this
communication will itself further erode confidence in Devuan as a
distribution. I do not want this, but I can no longer continue in the
face of such extreme opposition to my efforts to contribute to what I
believe is a fine and necessary project that I have come to rely on for
my business and am deeply invested in.
Devuan belongs to the community and that community must always hold the
power to decide who it will entrust as it's leaders and contributors.
Should you the community decide it is time for me to leave, I will do my
best to take the time to hand over properly my responsibilities and
share my deep knowledge to those chosen by you the community to replace
me in an orderly fashion and then fade quietly away.
Warm regards,
Centurion_Dan.
--
Daniel Reurich
Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd.
021 797 722