Release schedule plans

[Vlad Dascalu]

Gervase Markham wrote:

> I'm not in a defensive state.

Gerv, I think you are. But you don't realise that. At least you were in 
a specific defensive state when you started this whole flame thing while 
writting at the same time:

 >> This is NOT trying to start a flamewar with Vlad

Post-mortem, that's exactly what you did. And I believe pretty high 
about your intelligence, so I doubt you would have missed what you were 
about to do, unless for the defensive state in which you were.

> Vlad, I think you are mistaken - the entire conversation about your 
> way of communicating has taken place on developers at . I can't see any 
> message on reviewers@ which could be classified as a 'speech'.

Replace 'speech' with 'arguments' pending between you and me on 
developers@ and you'll get a much bigger picture of what I intended. The 
sentence:

>> please stop attacking Dave



came after the long reviewers@ discussion. It's not something that you 
would have said to me out of the blue, only after that single 
developers@ email, or without you in a defensive state. Assuming by 
absurd that indeed this is the case, that email is only about the 
"discretion" thing that I explained in a follow up (to which you didn't 
reply). So I think you have to agree that the reviewers@ thing was the 
source that started this flame.

> Several people are now politely pointing out that they have 
> difficulties with your communications style. You can continue to 
> ignore this feedback (in which case, you are still swinging the 
> baseball bat, and the obvious consequences will probably follow) or 
> you could think "hmm, now three people have told me the same thing - 
> perhaps they have a point".

Several people, including you, keep feeding to this thread its flames. 
Several people are replying to emotional stuff instead of focusing on 
the topic, the Release schedule. Several people are derailing the 
conversation. I'm certainly not ignoring the feedback. It's a thing that 
will reflect upon your evaluation.

I suggest to stop formulating things in a threatning way: "obvious 
consequences will probably follow". I am very much aware of the 
consequences of my actions and I am partially pleased on how that went. 
If you instead would be more focused on improving the Bugzilla's goals 
and interests instead of improving the communication environment, then 
Bugzilla would be better in the long term. You have to learn that not 
always "by the book" communication is in the project's interests.

People don't have difficulties with my communication style, because, if 
anything, you could have learned over the past years that my regular 
contributor style of discussion is quite relaxed and welcomed. What 
people have difficulties with is understanding that they can't comment 
out on the situation without having the background knowledge on 
reviewers@ (all the people that jumped in your wagon train, Nick, Shane, 
Kevin, lacked that). Also, they have difficulties understanding that 
this is a specific case where I made communication the #2 priority and 
moved Bugzilla's interests to the first place. Otherwise, I wouldn't 
classify those as "difficulties".

> I should note again here that it took several people telling me this 
> over a long period before I actually got it. Perhaps you just have to 
> say "I don't understand why it is that people react in this way, and 
> don't like people communicating like that, but they don't. So I just 
> have to accept that fact."

I understand perfectly why people reacted in this spirit. It's due to 
parts of your and my emails that don't have anything to do with the 
topic. The inability to focus on the issues that matters is worthy to be 
further analysed and solutions developed to that, although I reckon it's 
a human trace :-)

> After all, if the goal of communication is to communicate, one should 
> make every effort to communicate in a way that people appreciate.

No. The goal of communication is in this case to reach the Bugzilla 
goals. If it were to simply communicate, we wouldn't have reached this 
point in the first place.

Vlad.