Hi Paul,
[Your plain text email part of the mail is strangely indented.]
Thanks for pointing that out. I use my coreboot.org e-mail address sparingly and it seems there were some minor issues in how I was using the webmail client. Let's see if this message shows up better...
- Who is the current coreboot leadership? How many of those voted, and
what was the result?
It's currently Stefan, Werner, and myself. When things blew up in the patch you cited we started an e-mail thread to discuss what was to be done, and we agreed that rules/guidelines need to be enforced.
We tried to reach a consensus quickly, taking into account timezone differences, then discussed the issue in the leadership meeting on Jan. 29 and followed-up with an e-mail to the list (a poorly formatted one - sorry).
The project structure was put into place when coreboot joined the Software Freedom Conservancy, and is described in the following PDF (note: I stepped in when Marc Jones withdrew): https://www.coreboot.org/images/b/b4/Coreboot_and_the_Software_Freedom_Conse...
- Which comment violated the guidelines? I guess it’s about change-set
[2]? Reading the comments, and considering, that English is not the mother tongue of some participants, and reading an apology, I’d really like to know what Gerrit guide lines were violated.
- Why did the coreboot leadership not step in earlier to avoid further
escalation despite being added early on as reviewer so was made aware of the discussion?
Although the patch is what spurred action in this case, what happened was the result of tensions that had built up over several months. I think this is generally true of past incidents as well - Frustration builds and people eventually burn out or lose their temper.
coreboot is a highly active project and we have a large, global community. It is practically impossible for a small handful of people with day jobs to monitor every interaction and Gerrit comment.
That said, there is room for improvement in our guidelines and earlier intervention. We obviously don't like losing developers, so waiting for things to explode is not a viable path forward. I hope we can reach a better understanding of the underlying issues and develop guidelines to avoid the build-up of tensions we saw here. The "Workflows and Guidelines" thread is a good start.
Hopefully, there will be an amicable outcome nevertheless.
For sure! If this were about some troll who just showed up then dealing with the problem and moving on would be easy. Dealing with the fallout in this case will take a lot more time and effort but I hope we can eventually be whole again.