Quoting Jaromil (jaromil@???):

> Precisely. I am afraid though, that people will just go on writing
> "please stay <3" letters to CenturionDan, (who is the one responsible
> for Katolaz to leave, for the CI for being down, for this drama here)
> without even thinking how other volunteers feel like. Because this is
> how politics work: personalisations, egos and populism.

I waited a day, before commenting about this, because I needed to ponder
the matter carefully and not seem as if I were taking sides in
intra-Devuan Project interpersonal warfare.

Jaromil, I was extremely serious when I said you-all caretakers should
convince each other to _cease battling each other in e-mail_. The only
result is angry resignations, which is about as useful to an open source
project as sawing off your own arm.

Cease battling each other in e-mail. Jesus Jehosephat Christ, man,
isn't the wisdom of that advice clear _yet_?

All of you, your good self, Enzo/KatolaZ, Dan Reurich, Ralph Ronnquist,
Evilham, golinux (who's been constructive and blameless as always),
fsmithred, and others I'm probably forgetting, should be acting to end
the interpersonal craziness. Nobody should be forced out, nobody should
be driven to quit, everyone who's leaving in anger should be invited to
a Jitsi conference where you figure out how to bury the hatchet and
come up with a more-constructive way of resolving disputes. (I'm
aware that extremely bad things are happening in private communications.
IMO, you should be working nonstop to not only stop but reverse those
things.)

The Jenkins server thing? That was an annoying technical failure, but
did not in any way justify your firebreathing public and private
e-mails. Treat it as a minor organisational-process bobble that took
down an important system. Use the event as an opportunity to make sure
you have working failover plans. I've built and administered Jenkins
servers, most recently on remote-hosted VMs on AWS where failure of a
new kernel to boot would have been deeply problematic. OK, so that
happened. This is where you not only stand up a new Jenkins instance
(if necessary, reconstructing it from scratch) but also make sure daily
offsite scripted backups occur plus that you have the ability to quickly
deploy a replacement host and restore state. At that point, any similar
incident can be dealt with by using that recovery plan and then
repointing DNS.

I'm only a friendly outsider, but can say as a senior sysadmin and
professional Operations person that the ci.devuan.org thing was not
something to get angry and start threatening people over, no matter how
many older grudges you've been holding. The infrastructure is important
but only a small problem. The people / communication problems you and
the other caretakers have been failing to solve are an, frankly, an
emergency.

Dismiss the circular firing squad, sir. Get everyone to come back
onto Jitsi at some mutually convenient time, and talk things out.

And cease battling each other in e-mail. Now.


Oh, and I cannot resist sounding very non-American for a moment:
You're deeply mistaken in deploring 'politics'. Politics is good!
Politics, from the Greek Πολιτικά, means conducting the public's
business. All software projects have politics, and the mature raction
to that fact is not to recoil from it and call it base and evil, but
rather to embrace it. Politics is part of the process of collective
action, of getting things done.

Populism? Egos? Personalisation? Sure. Those happen, and are part of
the carnival, because there are human beings involved, and so one must
be aware of those basic facts and swim through them, keeping on eye
on what is actually the agenda.