RFC: safe pattern matching for problematic encoding

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2012-06-07 17:31, Martin Geisler wrote:
> Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> writes:
> 
>> On 2012-05-25 20:50, Matt Mackall wrote:
>>
>>> Now you've wasted another hour+ of my time and predictably gotten
>>> nowhere, because there's exactly zero new information in either your
>>> message or my response that hasn't been repeatedly presented over the
>>> past seven years. That's an hour I could have used doing something
>>> useful, or at least spent without elevated blood pressure. In other
>>> words, you have successfully trolled me. Pleased with yourself,
>>> troll?
>>>
>>> If you want to do something useful, go work on the VFS layer.
>>
>> While we're at it, and for the records, I do find how Matt treated
>> Martin here totally out of line.
> 
> Thanks Adrian.
> 
> I've been really disappointed by the silence here since I expected
> people to point out that the angry tone is unacceptable. People have
> contacted me off-list ("thanks for being brave in the Unicode debate!"),
> and while it is comforting, it is still sad that people feel the need to
> say this in private.
> 
> I brought it up on G+ and when asked directly, people said that the tone
> was bad, but understandable:
> 
>   https://plus.google.com/108957994038017966408/posts/GgxTNCEm8gC
> 
> Apparently the problem was the "before you stop yelling" part, which was
> seen as "extremely hostile", even though I continued by stating that I'm
> genuinely interested in these cross-platform issues.
> 
> 
> I've just been to DjangoCon Europe and the low ratio of women to men in
> the community was a hot topic. They are afraid that the tone in their
> community (which seems extremely friendly to me!) scares some women
> away... I couldn't help smiling a little since the tone in our community
> almost scared me away.

Well, Martin. You surely do also contribute a bit oil into the fire at
times by continuing to want to discuss things that are no longer really
up for debate. We also have to be careful about not wasting Matt.

I do understand you would like to discuss things further at times. But
if Matt doesn't want, then we should stop discussing it. Of course it
sometimes isn't that obvious. Perhaps someone thinks, he or she has new
argument, but then only later on it turns out it is not a new one. Matt,
as a genius, is able to quickly see that. And gets annoyed, because he
doesn't see that others may not have quite followed him. Or we just
simply disagree with him. Then we have to accept his decision.

What's unprofessional here is, if Matt fails to simply write: "Hey,
we've discussed this, see there and there. I see no new argument and I
don't want to reopen the discussion." Yet, he has written another
emotional posting, defending his position, resorting to name calling.

What's not good is this "making look people silly" twist in this. That's
kindergarten and unprofessional.