Quoting Jaromil (jaromil@???):

> It wasn't meant to "shoot" anyone, lastly golinux; it was a generic
> reply to a lot more drama on IRC and elsewhere.

I understood your intent and meant absolutely not criticism of you.
(IMO, nobody would have had cause for taking offence, either.)


My real point was one about process, and perhaps I can arrive at it
indirectly by telling a small story.

Long decades ago when I was first in an IT department (which was then
called MIS, for Management Information Services), I cynically observed
to a fellow IT guy that the pinnacle of success in running an IT
operation was to have zero operational problems, everything running
smoothly all the time, and that the end-result is one's work becomes
invisible to management, so eventually they will terminate your
employment since they don't see value in your work. The other fellow,
getting into the spirit of cynical observation, said there was a
standard remedy: A wise IT person should certainly keep things running
smoothly, but also occasionally engineer small crises which the IT
engineer is then able to visibly resolve, thereby proving his/her value
to the firm.

That was not, of course, sincere advice, but rather dark humour -- yet
there was some truth in it. There's a tendency for many organisations
to be crisis-driven, which usually means small problems weren't timely
addressed and became big ones.


I leave any specific application of that insight to Linux distributions
to those who are insiders, which I am not.

And, generally, I try to model erring on the side of being cheerful and
friendly in the context of any volunteer effort, and trying carefully to
neither give nor take personal offences -- in part because, in my
experience, giving and taking personal offence is _actually_ harmful
in exactly the way that perhaps slightly excessive praise is not.