On Tuesday 13 August 2002 08:07 pm, Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > > Curt, I think his reply stems from his frustration of chosen content in
> > > many emails that originate from you. We all pretty well understand
> > > postgres has a broken feature. We all understand you see zero value in
> > Knowing Don to some extent, I can say with some assurance that his
> > 'attacks' are never unprovoked.
> Sorry; I'm not aware of the circumstances under which one is supposed
> to call someone a "dick-waver" and other such things on a technical
> mailing list. Perhaps you can explain to me when one should be
> doing this, so I too can do it at the appropriate times.
I never said I agreed with his wording; in fact I don't agree with his
wording. But that's not the point. The point is that the discussion was
going absolutely nowhere, quickly. Don's colorful metaphors (for lack of a
better term) aren't ones I would use, by any means -- but they had the
desired effect, didn't they?
The discussion has since progressed from 'the feature is broken because I say
it is' to 'how can we fix the broken feature' -- which is where Don, Hannu,
and Greg, unless I am mistaken, were all going towards. If you, Curt, were
just trying to play devil's advocate you went just a little too far, too
vehemently, and were flamed in the old alt.flame tradition. Had the words
'Hitler' or 'Nazi' shown up we would have known it had gone the next step --
and I'm just relating Usenet tradition here -- I'm not a party to that
tradition, but I certainly have seen enough flamewars to know what they
disintegrate into. I for one am glad you toned down the 'devil's advocate'
point of view so that a useful discussion arises (which has indeed happened).
And I just stated my experience with Don -- no agreement (or judgment) was
implied or stated. I've just developed code beside him before. I wish I had
more time to develop code on OpenACS, in fact -- but that's even further
off-topic. Don Baccus is well-mannered and even tempered until provoked.
When provoked; well, you see what happens.
Now, let's see the constructive discussion continue, without authoritarian
posturing (for lack of a more technical term for Don's colorful metaphor).
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11
