Sven Luther and Debian mailinglists
A few days ago, I forwarded a mail from Sven Luther to the debian-vote and debian-project mailinglists. The reason I did so was that, apart from the last two paragraphs, the mail's tone was reasonable, polite, and did not try to rehash the old arguments. Also, and more importantly, I thought it was a useful contribution to the discussion at hand. I then received a private email in response to that forward from someone—who shall remain nameless—that expressed disapproval of this forwarding. Not because of the content (which i could understand), but because of the person whose mail I forwarded.
I am shocked beyond words that such a thing is possible. Mind you, I'm not supporting at this point that we just allow Sven back in the project; the decision to throw him out was based on solid arguments, and though I am sad that it was necessary, I do support the decision that has been made. However, I would think we would have expelled him because of the problems that resolved around his person, rather than because we didn't like his name, background, or, say, the color of his skin.
Problems can be solved. Personalities can change. Throwing a person out of the project because of interpersonal problems is one thing. Forbidding him to ever join it again is quite another.
I'm not saying we should just forget the whole thing, pretend it never happened, and move on. However, I do not think that just because the man has a history, we should ignore his useful contributions.
Although I disagree with some of the suggestions he made, I do happen to think that this particular contribution was useful, and so I forwarded it. I do disapprove of some of the things he's done, but that doesn't mean I disapprove of the person; I do believe any person deserves a minimum of respect.
Apparently some people in this project disagree with me on that, however. I'm not sure what I'll do about that, but suffice to say that I will not be part of a project that considers a person's history to be of more importance than a person's current behaviour.
Let's hope this is just the opinion of one person...
I'm not sure I necessarily agree with your correspondent, but I can see the point. It's that, frankly, Sven Luther has a very strong desire to keep this issue alive and does so in part by keeping his name on the mailing lists and trying to route his messages through other people. I don't believe this is solely to contribute to a discussion; I believe it is, in part, an attempt to keep re-arguing the explusion by staying in people's faces.
By forwarding a message from him, you're preserving his useful contribution, which is good. But you're also encouraging him to continue this tactic and not make the break from Debian that a lot of the project thinks should be made. He's not gone away and thought about things and come back with a different attitude. He's never left, or rethought his attitude, and is just finding new ways to keep the argument current and portray himself as a martyr. I would be worried that the next message would be more confrontational, the one after that even more, and so forth, following the pattern that he's followed innumerable times before. All attention is just encouragement of this process. If we hadn't seen it happen literally dozens of times, I'd be more inclined to say there was no harm in forwarding a useful message, but we have.
The above is something of a devil's advocate argument. I'm not sure you did the wrong thing. But that's why I discard all of his mail without replying.