On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Aleksey Bragin
<aleksey@reactos.org> wrote:
You do know I don't hate you, rather vice versa, I try to help any
newcomer.
He did that with me, and I am not a valuable developer.
As Dmitry said, your point of view is slightly biased. Try not to
engage into argument with everyone, and try to do some analyze: a
newcomer is a foreigner to our team. A guest. Who is always received
nice at first. Later, if the guest behaves good, he's benefitting his
staying. If the guest tries to set some new orders, demand something
or anything else - he might get a negative perception.
Exactly what I did. And I think I didn't get a negative perception - nobody goes "oh great, that guy again" on IRC, not even when I talk.
What I want you to be sure about: newcomers, especially as valuable
as developers are received very good and welcomely. Then, it all
depends on a particular person, his social abilities, and interaction
with other members of our team. Which is, in general, very friendly
(how else could we work for so many years and not ran away?! ;)).
This is the most important part of Aleksey's e-mail. I have seen people join the channel and say "hi, I can be a dev, what do I do?" No one told them to go away. Everyone just told them to pick a thing to do and what the rules are (e.g. if you submit a patch, you don't commit it yourself, another developer reviews it first and then submits it if it's ok, mentioning your name - same for translations).
Haven't seen your story on IRC but inside this project, smart assing requires style, near-perfect knowledge of English, delicate manners, awesome charm but most of all, a great sense of right and wrong. Two people do this in a fantastic way: another Alex and a cook-programmer-writer-gentleman who's generally very busy. You're either born with this or not, you can't educate it. There was a discussion earlier on this mailing list about how commits should be formatted. These people included insults in a template, Alex. It doesn't even matter what the template was for. This is not because they're evil or aggressive, but because this is how they work - affectionately. Affectionate insults, bragging, kicking, banning or whatever else. Don't think "affectionately" excludes "rationally," though. When they need to be rational, they are. This was the case when you got banned. No one cared who was right, it's just that no one wanted to have a troll hanging around shouting who-knows-what. They don't have time to carefully weigh every aspect and every nuance of what you said. The rules are very elastic but no abuse.
That different Alex, at one point, fixed a very old bug. After doing so, he said:
"I have fixed the oldest bug in ReactOS history"
"Thank you"
" *unzips pants* "
Now, before you say these people are evil, read this:
I'm not saying you are one of those, I'm just saying "don't become any of those."
And then, watch this:
You should be able to behave correctly after paying attention to all of that.
This project might look like it could be much more and it could fail and all that. This was "predicted" so many times...but ReactOS still goes on. I did have my own ideas about the project, but you can't implement a clone of the Vista Aero interface without having the display functionality working darn well (I didn't suggest that, just an example).
So, patience. As either a user or a developer. No one wants you dead or banned or anything else. People are not reluctant to newcomers - not these people.
I believe we have met Stefan's doppelganger! (read: evil other self)
On Jul 17, 2009, at 7:00 PM, Alex wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Open-source and newcomers
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>