From: mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de 
  
 Hi, 
  
 On Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 10:07:02AM -0700, Otto Kek€€l€€inen wrote: 
 >Please remember to check if your package has open MRs *at least once* 
 >before the next upload! 
  
 This is good advice to put into an upload workflow, yes. For people who 
 have been around in Debian for longer than ten years this is a 
 significant change that needs to grow into finger memory. Please be a 
 bit more forgiving towards your fellow developers who might not be as 
 brilliant as you are. 
  
 >I have now witnessed several cases where a maintainer blatantly 
 >ignored the MRs their package received. It is demotivating to new 
 >aspiring Debian contributors to put in significant effort to learn the 
 >complexities of Debian packaging and submit an improvement, only to 
 >see that the maintainer two months later didn't look at the MR at all, 
 >and instead implemented the same change themselves, and the 
 >submitter's work essentially got wasted. 
  
 I think it is well inside a package maintainer's prerogatives to not 
 accept a MR completely. Sometimes it is just faster to do one-liner 
 changes in an already checked out repository than going through the 
 sometimes arcane and complicated€€ Gitlab methods if there are issues 
 with the suggested changes. 
  
 When I am the person submitting an MR, I sometimes perceive comments 
 like "I don't like this, please change the wording to this, and do 
 better indentation there" like as if a teacher is talking down to their 
 students. 
  
 I would be grateful if the receiver of my MR would fix my MR in a way 
 that suits their needs. I am pretty sure that this workflow is saving 
 time on both the MR's submitter and receiver's side if the change is 
 trivial enough. Other people seem to take anything that doesn't end with 
 a click on the "Merge" button in Gitlab as a personal offense. I 
 disagree here. We should all assume good faith and accept actions of the 
 other side that move in to the right direction with appreciation and not 
 with contempt. 
  
 What I am trying to say is that not everybody ticks like you are. The 
 respective other side of the MR is acting in the same good faith like 
 you are, with very similiar results, just not in 100 % exactly the way 
 YOU find right. I would appreciate you trying to accept that other 
 people work differently then you are and trying to not lash out towards 
 them like you are doing in the message I am replying to. 
  
 I would not have written this if there hasn't been a pre-story between 
 the two of us. 
  
 A few days ago, you submitted a trivial but important MR to one of my 
 packages. I agreed with two of your three changes, but disagreed with 
 the third. I quoted the relevant part of policy in a review message (I 
 still think that I understand the Vcs-Git headers in debian/control the 
 correct way). 
  
 I politely thanked you for spotting my stupid omssions, tried to express 
 my appreciation and - in good faith - quickly pulled the two changes I 
 agreed with and created and pushed the two commits manually (of course 
 crediting you for your work in the commit message) instead of letting 
 them wait in the MR for us to sort out the third issue. 
  
 I promptly received a beating simliar to what you have written above, 
 saying that I demotivate you and that I am being disrespectful. I acted 
 in good faith, my only interest was to reduce work on both sides of the 
 MR€€ and to speed things up. I absolutely didn't want to be disrespectful 
 and I surely didn't want to demotivate you. It was me asking your for 
 advice in the first place and I appreciate your help (albeit still not 
 understanding what exactly you did to help and thus unable to reproduce 
 this on my other packages that will need the same procedure in the 
 future). 
  
 Receiving this lashing demotivated _me_ from working on Debian for the 
 rest of today's afternoon. I spent that time playing with and hugging my 
 adorable cats instead. Thank you for making this possible. 
  
 Greetings 
 Marc 
  
 €€ I still don't know how do do minimal changes to commit messages from 
 MRs like adding a "Closes:" line short of git rebase -i after doing the 
 merge. There must be an easier method to do that from the web interface 
 but alas, I didn't find it yet. 
  
 €€ I am interested to hear what additional work I caused on your side by 
 quickly pulling parts of your MR to the target branch manually. The 
 result is the same: Your changes are in debian/latest, the next package 
 version will be better because of that, you're credited and appreciated 
 in the commit message, it just didn't happen in your way. Nothing was 
 lost, just a bit of my self-confidence in interacting with my fellow 
 DDs. 
  
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