Regarding posts from J?rgen Hestermann.
Unfortunately this is not the first time he finds excuses to blame Lazarus developers.
The main theme is that developers have done a poor job and did not serve him well enough.
Earlier it was about the new Unicode support. All the work I had done for it was irrelevant, he wanted to emphasize how poorly I had done the job.

This all reminds me of the horrible flame wars against FPC/Lazarus developers mostly in the forum. Many of the arguments were pure lies meant to agitate people and it worked well because there was nothing to stop them.
The people with admin rights were afraid to do anything because they would get all the blame.
Things escalated into surreal proportions.
In the horrible CodeTyphon flame war I took initiative and finally the issue calmed down. Yes, I took lots of mud on me during the process.

I have learned that no logical reasoning helps with such agitators. We need some rules instead. This is the "home" of our project. All important communication happens here and in the forum. Nobody should be allowed to come here only in the purpose of attack. For example: If I dislike some people, I don't go to their home to attack them and shit on their floor. Instead I stay away. The same rule should apply here. If somebody does not like us, he should write a hate-blog or something but stay away from our home.

Every healthy and strong community needs ways to protect itself. This project need them, too.
I know the flame-wars have caused motivation problems for developers and maybe caused them to leave. They have also scared away potential future contributors.
Something must be done. I myself feel strongly unmoticated after reading the attacks.

When somebody takes the effort and contributes something, he inherently "buys" voting power for the thing he implemented. Then he also has moral rights to criticise the work of other developers, but that right is not used much among the developers / active contributors.
They understand how much it takes to contribute stuff. Why would they criticise?

Thus, I want J?rgen Hestermann to make a public apology for the developers he has attacked here.
Further attacks should go to a personal blog somewhere. I promise to ignore it.

For future needs, do we a have a mechanism to ban people from this list? In forum the threads can be locked, posts deleted and accounts banned. Those tools were used at least during the CodeTyphon episode.

Juha

Hi,
?
part of reason may be that unsatisfied people are usually very loud while?satisfied are?usually?calm. Therefore I'd like to say here (loudly) that I was always (and I'm now) happy in Lazarus and FPC community (forum, ML, bugtracker) and developers and other people always helped when I needed it. Thank you. Flamewars on ML or in forum are IMO not so common, they are rather unique. ?
Vojtech

Juha Manninen wrote

For future needs, do we a have a mechanism to ban people from this list?

Hence I love NNTP. An admin can simply cancel a thread. With a mailing list somebody posts, and there is no way to stop that after the Send button was clicked.

Then again, I have had my share of being moderated in the FPC mailing list. I guess you can apply such rules here too.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Juha Manninen wrote

Regarding posts from J?rgen Hestermann.

While I understand your sentiments and emotions, I think it is unneccessary to mention specific names here.

I have learned that no logical reasoning helps with such agitators.

Yep, that's why they are trolls.

We need some rules instead. This is the "home" of our project. All important communication happens here and in the forum. Nobody should be allowed to come here only in the purpose of attack.

There is a thin line between attack and an strongly expressed emotions about the direction Lazarus/Fpc is moving to.

Something must be done. I myself feel strongly unmoticated after reading the attacks.

I simply stopped reading threads that were hijacked by such persons. Fortunately there are only a few, so remembering what to ignore is easy. The less respons, the earlier the thread will bleed dry.

Also, remember that all the energy you put into this fight is just negative energy.
It is not in your circle of influence, so all energy you put in there is wasted and just wears you down.

Thus, I want J?rgen Hestermann to make a public apology for the developers he has attacked here.

This is not very realistic.

For future needs, do we a have a mechanism to ban people from this list?

I believe that access to the ML can be blocked as well. But, like on the forum, this should only be done as a last resort (and after proper warning by an "administrator").

Bart

As someone who has been active on this list for a few weeks only, I want to take this opportunity to thank the developers both of Lazarus and FPC for your work, and also for being among the most approachable people in open source projects I know. You are part of why I migrated most of my desktop work to Lazarus by now: I know that even if something might be buggy, there are people that care and that even if it turns out I'm wrong and its not really a bug they will take the time to explain why (just take the amount of stuff I've learned over time around #24908. Others might just have closed this without any info). Keep it up!

And regarding Mailing Lists, mail clients (Thunderbird and probably others too) have pretty good filtering tools these days. TB can hide entire threads at once (press K), branches of threads (Shift-K) and for just hiding people, I have a filter set up for "From contains 'address', Action 'mark read'".

Have a good day,

Martok

Me too.
Thank you very much dear Juha ;)

Regards,
Ara

Bart wrote

While I understand your sentiments and emotions, I think it is unneccessary to mention specific names here.

Based on my earlier experiences I think it is very important to mention names. Even the biggest flame-wars roll around just few agitators.

Unrealistic demands like:
"Do not implement any new features until all existing features are documented!" already got support from new users who don't understand the psychology behind the attacks, nor do they know how much effort from the developers it required to bring the project into its current state.

Juha

Oh my god!! What a histerical tirade!
Why do you answer to all these posts if it brings you near to a heart attack? Just ignore them if it you don't want to discuss them. If you cannot live with any converse meanings then filter your mails from all these evil people like me.

J?rgen Hestermann wrote

Just ignore them if it you don't want to discuss them.

Even after filtering I would see replies for your mails. However that is not the point. The point is that you feel justified to attack Lazarus developers in their own mailing list for not doing enough work for you.
I could somehow understand your attitude if this was a commercially backed project and some big company used it for their business + compensated the developers financially.
No, this is a purely volunteer based project without any commercial support. Developers, including me, don't get payed! You and me are in the same position. Both of us like this project for some reason. I decided to contribute to make it better. You desided to attack the very people who contribute and make it better ... horrible person ...

I could take you a little seriously if you had contributed something but you haven't. Not even one small contribution.

From my experience I am quite sure you will not do it in future either.

So, here are the rules:
1. You can ask technical questions to help you solve your programming problems.
2. If you start to contibute yourself (very unlikely) then you have right to criticise the development process, although a decent person would not do it much even then.
3. Attacks against FPC/Lazarus developers must go to your personal blog somewhere. There already is an infamous blog against CodeTyphon. You can write something similar against Lazarus.

Juha

Juha Manninen wrote

users who don't understand the psychology behind the attacks,

That makes it sound as though the unpleasantness is orchestrated, or at least premeditated. I thinks that's some way from being proven.

Martok wrote

I have a filter set up for "From contains 'address', Action 'mark read'".

If you read the mailing list via the Gmain NNTP access, then you can use XanaNews NNTP client. It has features like "ignore thread", "add author to bozo bin", advanced filters etc. Perfect for getting rid of unwanted messages. ;-)

[1] XanaNews Releases:
https://github.com/graemeg/xananews/releases

Regards,
- Graeme -

I have no idea, what has been happening. I did not read any flame wars. But only as a general remark I'd like to make a suggestion:

Anybody beeing unhappy with the lack of $something could start some work to fill in the known gaps.

If this is about lacking documentation a first start could be to create a wiki page and list the missing features there. Maybe some developer or other person having enough knowledge is willing to give a short description for those topics listed and then a not so informed person could write a clear and polished documentation text.

Open Source is about helping to make things happen, not demanding others to do so. For the rest who do not like it there is always Delphi (if it still is named so ;).

Marc Santhoff wrote

Open Source is about helping to make things happen, not demanding others to do so.

+1

zeljko

+1 !!!

While of course the Lazarus system suffers from some historical shortcomings, imported from several Delphi versions and introduced by the IMHO not perfectly drawn line between the fpc RTL and the LCL, everybody needs to be happy that there is Lazarus in the rather great state as it is. Of course non - standard targets (like deeply embedded stuff, Rich internet applications, just to name a few) are less actively supported than the normal Windows/Linux/Mac Desktop. But work is done at many frontiers.

Thanks AGAIN,
-Michael
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On 09/04/16 18:14, Juha Manninen wrote:
[...]

this seems a bit overboard: you'll end up having only 'pats on the back' around, and no more of a bit more critical input.

Yes critics can be tiring and I can see your point that they are... (aside from, whether they know, what they are talking about, or not) but without them, or if you ignore them by default, you'll never get 'the bigger picture' input. You will only get the view of the convinced ones.

Such is the nature of this trade, that when lots of people are required to focus hard on what they are doing, to get decent results in their chosen part of the field, switching contexts is hard. For people less trained, it is even harder.
(obligatory xkcd : https://xkcd.com/309/ [there likely was another one, more fitting, that I can't find quickly now])

3. Attacks against FPC/Lazarus developers must go to your personal blog somewhere. There already is an infamous blog against CodeTyphon. You can write something similar against Lazarus.

Hmmm...
I read this mailing list / newsgroup (through gmane) daily. I do not appreciate having to go to some obscure web space blog, where the author of a post has omnipotent powers to shut discussion on a topic [as is the case with blogs] when he wouldn't like the comments he would (inevitably) get if he did that.
At least here, there is not just you who can, and want to, rebuke the likes of J.H.

Juha

-L.

That is so rude of you (J?rgen) to say that. By your reasoning, let us all attack you (J?rgen) and your attitude and you should just ignore it or filter your mails.

We should all thank the developers for their selfless contribution to this open source project. They work for free and deserve our respect at the very least.
I, myself, am very thankful to Lazarus and FPC. Without them, I had to pay a lot of money to upgrade to Delphi, which I hate after version 7, for my work to make a living. I make money from a FREE open source project which developers work without reward. I want to say loudly here, THANK YOU ALL!

Dennis

Money is just a point, Major point for me is quality. I like FPC and Lazarus more than many programming tools I ever used, thanks to its developers all over the world.

Regards,
Ara

Dennis wrote

That is so rude of you (J?rgen) to say that. By your reasoning, let us all attack you (J?rgen) and your attitude and you should just ignore it or filter your mails.

I don't know why I am the bad guy now.
I did not start these personal attacks.
I just reacted on them.
Please read the whole thread(s) to see how this all started. What did I write that justifies such a personal attack on me and request a "public apology"?

We should all thank the developers for their selfless contribution to this open source project. They work for free and deserve our respect at the very least. I, myself, am very thankful to Lazarus and FPC. Without them, I had to pay a lot of money to upgrade to Delphi, which I hate after version 7, for my work to make a living. I make money from a FREE open source project which developers work without reward. I want to say loudly here, THANK YOU ALL!

Of course, nobody here wants to miss any of the current state of Free Pascal/Lazarus. So anybody who was/is involved in coding here can be thanked very much. But does that mean that any discussions about improvements is forbidden?

J?rgen Hestermann wrote

Of course, nobody here wants to miss any of the current state of Free Pascal/Lazarus. So anybody who was/is involved in coding here can be thanked very much. But does that mean that any discussions about improvements is forbidden?

I overreacted and used stronger words than necessary. Sorry about that! The issue itself was valid though. Your emphasis was that current developers should do more and better work.
It is a little sensitive issue in a purely volunteer based project. If you had some idea of improving things yourself, things would be different.

See, a commercial product works differently. Its developers are filtered and isolated from user feedback more. Feedback and bug reports come from support channels and personnel. Requirements come from marketing through development managers. And developers get salary which compensates any possible negative feedback.
It means people can write ugly things about for example Delphi in public programming forums as a funny "small talk". It is not personified to anybody (much anyway) and the developers can continue undisturbed.

Open source is more ... open!
Voluntary people work because they want to. They are not pushed by anybody else to it.
How can it work? It is something very subtle and fragile. The motivation comes exactly from the freedom.
Between developers there are never demands like "you must do that feature because I say so". The freedom to do or not to do is a "holy ground".
Even projects that have a dictator (Lazarus project has none) do not impose such demands. Otherwise the project would be forked very quickly.
The highly open and transparent development model + the fragile motivation based on freedom makes an open source project vulnerable to attacks.
Communication in mailing list goes directly to developers without buffering or filtering or middle-men.

One more thing:
I wrote earlier "arguments were pure lies meant to agitate people" which was out of context.
The context were some forum flames, especially the pro-/contra-CodeTyphon war. If somebody does not know what happened, send me a personal mail and I give a recap.
I will NOT return to that topic more in a public list.

Juha