Re:Two Commits and the User Experience of Git
by dfabulich on Thursday July 06, 2017 @03:51PM
(#14713335)
(Author here.) Let me begin by noting that your comment, criticizing my courtesy, calls me "lazy," "cocksure," and "timid." Name calling is not compatible with the basic courtesy you're calling for.
Despite this, I'll respond to you with basic courtesy.
As a maintainer of open-source projects myself, I hate it when people email me directly with questions. I ask that everyone use only public channels of communication, if only because that way everyone can benefit from hearing the answers. In my opinion, I showed courtesy and not "timidity" by not spamming Hamano's personal inbox.
However, I recognize that not everyone feels this way, and so I have taken your point and I have emailed Hamano directly. (I hope he doesn't mind.) If he responds either on the git list or to me privately, I'll update the post.
There's also the broader context that naming people that way is a signature of the online callout culture, where the goal is shaming and humiliation. This is so common now that it's likely to be the default frame when people run across it.
> Well, I posted a question on the Git mailing list to ask, but the Git mailing list is so noisy that I doubt that anybody will ever answer my question, least of all Hamano. But I can speculate as to why; if I were Hamano, I probably would have made the same mistake.
And no, posting to the mailing list, which the author himself admits is too noisy for the commiter to have likely noticed, is not a real effort to make contact given the severity and self-assured nature of the assertion, which suggests to me that the author is lazy in other ways that make his analysis suspect. Seriously, the author is so cocksure about the problem, and yet too timid to email Hamano, who is on Github and has a listed email address?
It's an appalling lack of basic courtesy, never mind intellectual curiousity.