kubuntu-council team mailing list archive

[Simon Quigley <tsimonq2@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Kubuntu Council,

I would like to start by apologizing. I would like to apologize not only 
for not being here for the past couple of weeks, but for my conduct the 
day before leaving. In this email, I would like to explain what I did, 
why I did it, what I think of my actions now, and what I would like to 
do going forward.

Here’s what I did. I staged KDE Frameworks 5.30 after being told not to 
(while not explicitly, if I recall correctly). The day that I left, I 
wanted to give them a “going away surprise” (this is what I labeled it 
as). I wanted to start the initial staging process of getting Frameworks 
5.29 prepared a few weeks before that, but we had hit some issues 
getting Frameworks 5.28 in the archive so we decided to wait. I was 
frustrated that Rik had staged Plasma 5.8.5 without saying anything in 
#kubuntu-devel. So my reasoning for this was half assuming it would give 
me someone to point at when people realized this and half assuming it 
would fix some issues that Frameworks 5.28 had.

Let me just say this with bold and underline: _*THIS WAS NOT RIGHT. THIS 
WAS STUPID.*_ It was 10 PM and I was getting ready to go to bed when I 
pushed this. It was a long day and I wasn’t feeling right, and it felt 
mischievous and wrong. I fully acknowledge this was one of the more 
stupid things I’ve done in my life. It’s not a mistake I can learn from, 
it’s not a mistake that I can correct now, it was stupid, late night, 
ill-conceived thought. It’s not like I planned each of the three 
screwups for weeks and weeks before and decided to ruin everyone’s day. 
It was an impulsive decision.

It’s not the first time I’ve done this, and I’m frustrated at myself. I 
really am. Sometimes I make late night decisions and facepalm at it the 
day after. I find myself trying to explain myself, and I can’t even find 
a justification to justify it to myself (I was grabbing at straws when I 
was explaining above, let’s be honest), which frustrates me because not 
being able to explain my actions to myself makes me feel like I have a 
Chaos Monkey[1] running in my head (no, not a chaotic monkey, it’s a 
program :P). Most of the time I make rational, smart, thought-out 
decisions, but when I get tired enough, the lack of development in the 
prefrontal cortex of my brain really shines in the worst of ways. It 
causes me to burn bridges instead of build them. And that’s what I feel 
happened this time.

After I saw that my ninja status was revoked, I was frustrated. My 
little internal Chaos Monkey had gotten the best of me again. This 
turned into anger at myself then sadness. I was really sad that this had 
happened, but it was justified. I did something bad, and I was going to 
have to face the consequences. And it hurt, it really did. It still 
really hurts, now when I want to go to the channel and do something, I 
have to remember my stupid mistake and go through others to complete 
tasks, which reminds them of it to. That really hurts, but I have to 
suck it up and deal with it, just like every time I’ve done it before.

All I can do now is ask for forgiveness. I am really really sorry. I 
apologize to Rik for having to clean up the mess I made, and I apologize 
to the Council for having to make this decision. But I would like to 
move forward from this, and hopefully be able to start anew. I hope to 
be able to prevent this from ever happening again by getting better 
sleep and getting offline earlier in the evening. I will try my best to 
ensure that my bad late-night judgement doesn’t get the best of me when 
working with Kubuntu for a long time.

Moving forward from this, I would like to propose a short-term plan as 
to what I do in Kubuntu from this point on until my ninja access is 
restored. I would like to work on the following projects, using pull 
requests/merge proposals when necessary:

 1. Get some solid development documentation. Something Valorie could 
follow and understand (:P). This includes complete documentation 
describing how to use KCI (I’ll need people to get me screenshots as I 
don’t have access to do anything but read-only tasks…), development 
tools, our workflow, and any other relevant documentation.
 2. Reorganize kubuntu-automation so we know exactly what does what and 
we have some solid documentation as to how to use everything. I would 
also finish writing unit tests and any other automated testing we could 
use to ensure that everything always Just Works.
 3. Figure out what in the KCI code does what, either rewrite the 
majority of it in a more efficient and readable language or get some 
solid documentation for what code does what and documentation on 
contributing and editing code. After I do this, I want to make sure once 
and for all that we have kubuntu_stable branches working and buildable 
images (maybe even autopkgtests to ensure that nothing breaks when we 
upload it to the archive). One more thing for this item, we need to find 
a way to leave notes on each one of the jobs and/or ignore it in KCI to 
finally get ALL of the jobs working or bugs reported to get them 
working.

Those are three elephants in the room that I really think we need to get 
going to make the most use out of our tools. This will really help us in 
the long run if this is documented very well.

Again, I apologize. I realize what I did was a terrible decision, but I 
look forward to working in the Kubuntu team for a long time to come, and 
I would like to be able to make things right and solve any issues I may 
have caused. Please let me know if there is anything specific I can do 
to earn ninja status back besides knocking out those three big tasks and 
doing other miscellaneous packaging tasks that may arise.

Thank you for your time.

[1] https://github.com/netflix/chaosmonkey

--
Simon Quigley
tsimonq2@xxxxxxxxxx
tsimonq2 on freenode and OFTC
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