Re: More votes in Debian? Any idea for improvement?
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 04:19:44PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> To make this concrete, we had a spat of GRs to decide various technical
> and social issues in Debian some years back, and that practice has died
> out almost completely. I know I at least much prefer the current
> situation to when lots of contentious decisions involved GRs; [...]
Personally, I would put this down to Debian simply not having any
contentious decisions to make. I haven't been following Debian as closely
as I once did, though, so perhaps I just haven't seen them.
I wonder if anyone can name three "big" controversies over the past few
years that have gotten resolved within Debian?
To be more specific: something "important" where there's (at least)
two different choices that groups of different developers want to make,
and some resolution has been arrived at beyond "ignore the whole issue"
or "everyone who thinks X has given up/gone away, therefore Y" or "wait
and see what other distros do"?
A resolution might be winner vs loser (we package stuff in deb, not rpm;
we continue with the non-free section of the archive), but it doesn't have
to be; sometimes everyone gets convinced that's there's a best way to do
things; other times there are technical solution that makes both things
possible (alternatives making vim and nvi both work as the default vi,
Provides:/Conflicts: for MTAs, packaging both Gnome and KDE).
The biggest controversies in free software that I've seen just aren't
happening within Debian from what I've seen: Unity vs Gnome3 is an
Ubuntu/Gnome thing; upstart vs systemd is an Ubuntu/Fedora thing; funding
open source development is a Red Hat/Google/Intel/IBM/HP/Oracle/buxy
thing...
The biggest controversies I've seen in Debian have been things like
"when should dpkg multiarch get uploaded to experimental/unstable"
(resolved by a vote though not a GR...), or "what does Constantly
Usable Testing actually mean" (afaict resolved by effectively leaving
that project on hold so it doesn't have to be answered).
But maybe I've just missed a bunch of interesting contentious issues
Debian's resolved without a vote over the past few years?
Cheers,
aj
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