Re: [rain1 at airmail dot cc] Delete abortion joke

[Torvald Riegel <triegel at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, 2018-05-08 at 01:45 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On May  7, 2018, "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 05/07/2018 12:45 PM, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> >> I did get a (private) nod from our most senior maintainer, and no
> >> objections.
> 
> > Let me be clear here. You had many objections. Including those from
> > me as a GNU project maintainer.
> 
> I think I understand why you might think so, but I really did not.
> 
> You wrote:
> 
>   Until we reach some kind of consensus the joke will not go back into
>   the glibc manual according to the current community consensus rules.
> 
> but we *did* reach consensus, under the present rules, about my proposal
> to restore the initial state, therefore the condition that limited your
> objection above was met.

No, just because people didn't think that you would actually ignore the
consensus to remove, doesn't mean there was consensus.  Enough people
wanted it to be gone.

> > You cannot go back in time to a past discussions, claim there wasn't
> > consensus, and revert the patches.
> 
> I don't really have to go back in time.  There never was consensus.
> There was one objection there all the way from the beginning, that
> everyone else seems to have been blind to (for the lack of a better
> explanation).  Here, let me quote it for you:
> 
>   @c Put in by rms.  Don't remove.

Consensus does not necessarily mean unanimous consent.  People have seen
it, and it didn't change their opinion.

Please don't try to frame it all as one accidental mistake of forgetting
who the true leader is supposed the be, or something like that.  He has
a right to an opinion as everyone else does, but that's it, and it
matters whether there is consensus in the community or not.

> > You ignored consensus.
> 
> That's a very serious accusation.  I guess I can't object to that
> because I've accused the opposite position of cheating, but, really...
> It seems to me like you all ignored the consensus rules as well.  And
> also denied having contributed to what I actually took as consensus.

There was consensus to remove.  It doesn't need to be unanimous.  And
there still is strong consensus to remove.  There's no cheating in that
either.

> I don't see that phrased as accusations against e.g. Zack, but AFAICT he
> also checked in the removal of the joke by himself (except he
> disregarded RMS's comments from consensus assessment), without comment
> message review, for reasons of his own.  The only problem I see with
> that is disregarding a relevant opinion or two when assessing consensus,
> but what do I know?

It doesn't need to be unanimous.

FTR, I also agree with Carlos' other statements.