I've been lurking and resisting from posting, largely because ... I'm the last person to be telling people how to communicate in a friendly manner. I'm autistic, and one of the traits I get from that is the tendency to completely miss the subtleties of interpersonal communications, and to speak (write) in a fairly blunt manner. Thus I find I can quite easily turn a normal situation into a complete sh*tstorm without any effort at all :-(

But speaking as someone who's done practical jokes that weren't well received, and made cockups when administering systems, this recent sh*tstorm just isn't fair to anyone involved or productive to the project.

As Rick quite correctly notes :

Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> 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.

This. If you shout down anyone who gets something wrong (and then fixes it), then you end up only with people who either :
a) Have such a thick skin that they really don't care at all what people say to them or think of them.
b) Don't make such mistakes because they don't ever take any risk or try and go beyond whatever is already scripted for them - ie they don't really do anything all that useful.
Neither personality is what the project needs.

Look around and there are some seriously impressive buildings/structures - cathedrals, bridges, and so on. None of these were built without making mistakes. Lots of them fell down - the people building them learned from their mistakes, added to the pool of knowledge, and so built ever grander structures. So lets all* be part of a team building a construction to be proud of, rather than being one of a group with pick axes digging away under the foundations.

* Sadly I don't think I can include myself in that as I don't have the knowledge and skills to contribute - I can install a system and configure packages, but my programming these days is limited to a bit of Bash. I am deeply in awe of those of you who can write code, build packages, etc, etc.


> Populism? Egos? Personalisation? Sure. Those happen, and are part of
> the carnival, because there are human beings involved

This.
Being a group of diverse people with different views, traits, skills, etc is what makes life interesting. Yes, people will upset each other from time to time - but that too is part of making life interesting.