Intel Mesa Gives Problems With KDE's KWin, Again

[yotambien]

Couple of points:
- "I speak the truth even if it hurts." is quite a different statement
from "Germans speak the truth."
- Even then, it should be pretty obvious from the context that it's a
statement about Martin's own personal character and values, rather than
some kind of statement of German superiority.
- Perhaps you take issue with "You know we Germans are direct". It's of
course a huge generalization, but I do think it's commonly accepted that
for example western Europe tends to favor a somewhat more direct approach
in communication compared to for example eastern Asia. At worst the
statement is simply wrong, but I'd hardly call it racism in any
case.

I don't think the distinction between what refers to the character of the
author and what refers to some feature suposedly shared among Germans is
that neat. Was he really making a completely random, unrelated statement
about Germans, only to carry on with whatever he had in mind immediately
after? Like, you know spanish woman have moustache and I like Phoronix
forums? I don't think so. Actually, I had read those sentences in the
same way Blackstar had before he (inaccurately) quoted them in the forum.

Anyway, my partner is an expert on racism questions. She tells me
it would be a stretch to consider that a racist remark. Not because
some prejudice about Asians and Europeans is common place, or
because some cultural differences as was suggested before, but because
there is not enough material to know what the position of the author
really is. If he had made explicit, for instance, that Germans are direct
in constrast to, say, French, that would be OK because there isn't an
asymmetric power relation between those peoples. If Germans were direct as
opposed to Turks, and a positive value were assigned to directness (which
normally is) we could start talking about something. Since I won't find a
more informed opinion than hers on the whole internet, I retract my
comment about those words.

[Henri]

I don't think the distinction between what refers to the character of the
author and what refers to some feature suposedly shared among Germans is
that neat. Was he really making a completely random, unrelated statement
about Germans, only to carry on with whatever he had in mind immediately
after? Like, you know spanish woman have moustache and I like Phoronix
forums? I don't think so. Actually, I had read those sentences in the
same way Blackstar had before he (inaccurately) quoted them in the forum.

To me it seems obvious that Martin's intent was to express that as a person he values expressing his opinion / making issues he's running into known over avoiding potentially offending other people. I suppose you can argue about what the best way to express that is, but I don't think that's a very useful discussion by itself.

Anyway, my partner is an expert on racism questions. She tells me
it would be a stretch to consider that a racist remark. Not because
some prejudice about Asians and Europeans is common place, or
because some cultural differences as was suggested before, but because

In the interest of providing some background, I might as well mention that my maternal family is south American and (south)east Asian, and my paternal family is mostly Dutch. In my experience cultural differences are very much real, and there's still plenty of real racism to go around that making an issue out of this particular post isn't particularly useful or helpful.

opposed to Turks, and a positive value were assigned to directness (which
normally is) we could start talking about something. Since I won't find a

I wouldn't personally consider directness as having either positive or negative value. It has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation, but that's about it. If you take it a step further you might even argue that assigning a positive value to directness is in itself a cultural bias.

I think your partner's opinion is close enough to my own that I'd agree with her. I'd argue for "it clearly isn't" over "you can't really tell", but my main point would be that things like context and intent matter. Taking a quote out of context and mangling it like that is unfair, IMO.

[bridgman]

To me it seems obvious that Martin's intent was to express that as a person he values expressing his opinion / making issues he's running into known over avoiding potentially offending other people. I suppose you can argue about what the best way to express that is, but I don't think that's a very useful discussion by itself.

I read that comment as "sorry if this comes across as being a bit direct, that's the way I am (along with a lot of other people) and no offence is intended". Seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

[mat69]

[...]
As a reply to this thread as a whole (or perhaps this site in general...), please do some research, check facts, etc. before repeating things you read on some random part of the internet. The person you're repeating may not necessarily know what he's talking about either, and the consequences may not necessarily just be harmless flamewars.

Thanks for the clear up.
I read his mail, though when replying here I had forgotten the exact way he wrote it and so did not spote the wrong quote.

[BlackStar]

On rereading Martin's email, he did not write what I thought he wrote. His meaning probably was "you may not like the truth, but I'll still say it" rather than "(unlike you) I'll speak the truth because I am German", which was how I parsed it.

My apologies.

Having been on the receiving and the giving end of non-backwards compatible places, I can share the pain of Martin. Sometimes, there's simply no good solution: should you improve your implementation even though that might break existing programs? Or do you keep reporting invalid information because some application may have come to rely on it, even though you've explicitly written that this info shouldn't be relied upon? And if you go the second route, for how long?

It's all about tradeoffs. Those who have used the winapi should know the cost of backwards compatibility - much of the madness there is the result of support for win3.11-era applications.

And those who have programmed for MacOS/MacOSX should know the cost of evolving APIs: "what do you mean Carbon is deprecated in favor of Quartz? Am I supposed to rewrite a few million lines of code just because you say so?" (That's what, say, Photoshop had to go through).