On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:36:38PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes: > > I don't think the committee would be worse off without you; and I find > > it fundamentally disturbing that any of the founding members are still > > members ten years later. > I think this sentence strikes at the core of my reservations about this > proposal. The whole thing feels like an appeal to novelty fallacy. Well, if you assume change isn't going to change anything, then, well, I guess you've got your conclusion. Personally, I find that a fallacy in and of itself, though. There's two fundamental things that persuade me. First, change doesn't just happen, it takes people to cause it; and different people will cause different changes. The current crop of people have had their go -- all the current members have been on the technical committee in excess of two years, half in excess of six years. And their ideas haven't brought a lot of success to the committee; but _even if they had_ it would be time to try a new set of ideas. A good formula for almost everything is: Keep the things that have already been tried that worked. Try new things. Repeat. Calling novelty a fallacy is just crazy if you ask me. *shrug* The second aspect is there are three levels of "problem" involving people or personalities: 1. No problem, everything's fine, keep on keeping on! 2. Some problem, but not enough to cause a fuss 3. Major problems, where doing something about them can't be avoided If you don't have a no-fault means of transitioning people, problems in the second class don't get fixed, and Debian has a pretty strong tradition of considering as many problems as possible in case (2) rather than (3). It takes a _lot_ to remove someone for cause in Debian -- see the DPL recall vote, or any of the expulsions we've had, or any of the groups that haven't changed membership for a while in spite of complaints about the job they're doing and how others could do it better. Having a mechanism to regularly transition people without fault is an important safety valve. Cheers, aj
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