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I'm sorry

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Re: I'm sorry

#51
My best attempt at a tl;dr:

There are a number of projects under the .NET Foundation umbrella, all maintained by different teams.

The .NET Foundation, supposedly for billing reasons, switched to GitHub Enterprise. People weren't aware it was happening or that a side effect of this would be that certain people would have increased access to their repos.

The person writing this post, Claire Novotny, merged in something maintainers disagreed with and that she shouldn't have had GitHub permission to merge. This lead people to realize access controls had changed and become concerned about abuse of this power.

Re: I'm sorry

#52

holy fuck, does every little mistake need a solemn 4000 word apology these days? that’s already not a world i want to live in, but then even the apology gets shit on and invalidated. people need to take everything much less seriously, especially shit that happens on the internet. this whole thing should have been able to be a new PR with “sorry about the merge before, i screwed up and it won’t happen again” at the en…

wdym take everything less seriously? the internet is as real as real life, people who donate their time to work on OSS deserve respect and the same cordiality that they would irl.

i think her apology is a wash but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't act without empathy or reason.

you can enjoy not living in the world-- just go off grid and don't try to push that people can act without remorse or consequence :)

Re: I'm sorry

#53

Context: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38

It's so ridiculously annoying when an apology or PR statement assumes complete and total familiarity with the existing goings-on.

There's even a whole language of euphemism around it. "Recent events involving the community", et c. So lame!

Re: I'm sorry

#54
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the old adage - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was. And here, by "stupidity," I just mean the author didn't think about that. Too often people are willing to attribute sinister meaning to what, in reality, was just a mistake.

Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. The person in question did a PR, someone informed her that she should follow the rules, she didn't, merged her PR, more people complained. Right now the PR is still merged. She wrote that whole text, and the PR is still merged. Since I can't read people's mind, a good trick that I learned is to derive i…

> If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR?

Perhaps because nobody has asked her to do so. Despite the contribution process not being followed, the results are seemingly desirable; and so nobody seems to want to worsen the codebase by reverting the change, even temporarily.

Process is great when it improves quality, but process followed just to follow process—when it won't result in a change in quality—is just pageantry. Engineers are generally too practical (and impatient!) to participate in pageantry, even as an act of public humiliation for someone they're annoyed with.

The repo has other maintainers; any of them could have reverted the merge and demanded the PR process be followed, if they thought it was a good idea to do that. What intent do you derive from their inaction?

Re: I'm sorry

#55
post #3

Anyone have a link to the PR in question?

https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778

Wow. That’s very brazen to force a PR in like that.

The apology made it sound like a small change that didn’t follow protocol. I didn’t realize it got called out as it happened and she pushed it through anyway.

Re: I'm sorry

#56
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the old adage - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was. And here, by "stupidity," I just mean the author didn't think about that. Too often people are willing to attribute sinister meaning to what, in reality, was just a mistake.

Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. The person in question did a PR, someone informed her that she should follow the rules, she didn't, merged her PR, more people complained. Right now the PR is still merged. She wrote that whole text, and the PR is still merged. Since I can't read people's mind, a good trick that I learned is to derive i…

> and the PR is still merged.

It looks like the actual maintainer reverted it?

https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779

Re: I'm sorry

#57
What is with the comments calling this a non-appology? Do they need a hair shirt to make sure the sinners really suffer?

Hyperbole aside its kind of jarring reading a frank apology and ownership of actions (what they did, how it impacted others, why it was bad) that then gets dismissed entirely. I wonder what those people would consider to be sufficient?

It does not seem like there is any point to a public apology. You are going to get the same response whether you frankly admit fault or apologize because some one else didn't understand your good intentions.

Re: I'm sorry

#58
post #54
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. The person in question did a PR, someone informed her that she should follow the rules, she didn't, merged her PR, more people complained. Right now the PR is still merged. She wrote that whole text, and the PR is still merged. Since I can't read people's mind, a good trick that I learned is to derive i…

> If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR? Perhaps because nobody has asked her to do so. Despite the contribution process not being followed, the results are seemingly desirable; and so nobody seems to want to worsen the codebase by reverting the change, even temporarily. Process is great when it improves quality, but process followed just to follow process—when it won't result in a c…

> My understanding is that she did a PR, quickly merged it, and people only noticed after it had already happened. Nobody interjected to complain; there wasn't really time to do so.

The PR is here, it was explicitly rejected (with two comments) and closed before she merged it

https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778

Re: I'm sorry

#59

holy fuck, does every little mistake need a solemn 4000 word apology these days? that’s already not a world i want to live in, but then even the apology gets shit on and invalidated. people need to take everything much less seriously, especially shit that happens on the internet. this whole thing should have been able to be a new PR with “sorry about the merge before, i screwed up and it won’t happen again” at the en…

When it's 4000 words, they're saying "sorry, not sorry" and expecting to get away with it.

Re: I'm sorry

#60

My best attempt at a tl;dr: There are a number of projects under the .NET Foundation umbrella, all maintained by different teams. The .NET Foundation, supposedly for billing reasons, switched to GitHub Enterprise. People weren't aware it was happening or that a side effect of this would be that certain people would have increased access to their repos. The person writing this post, Claire Novotny, merged in something…

There is also the fact that some projects were moved from their maintainers' public GitHub accounts to the DNF's GitHub Enterprise accounts without notice.

If you read this discussion[1], several maintainers only found out today that their projects have moved accounts because reading the thread itself prompted them to double-check.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/38

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