Hey all, With this mail I'm formally delegating Debian's policy maintenance to the following group: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> Junichi Uekawa <dancer@debian.org> Andreas Barth <aba@debian.org> Margarita Manterola <marga@debian.org> This delegation is not intended to replace the collaborative process of basing policy on existing best practices by discussion and consensus building on mailing lists, but to ensure that the people who actually do the work to maintain policy definitely have the authority to do so. The delegation also includes the authority to add new people to the policy maintenance team and to define how the group is structured. AIUI, they'll be updating the policy-process document fairly soon to make it clear how other people can contribute to policy, and I believe that at least Russ and Marga will be spending some time doing some more routine policy tasks to improve their understanding of policy related issues. I know some other folks have already expressed interest in helping out on policy related tasks, and I'm pretty sure the policy team would appreciate your assistance, and be glad to offer suggestions on what forms your help might take. For those who don't know all DDs by name and reputation, some short bios: Manoj Srivastava has been one of the leading policy maintainers since 1998 and a member of the technical committee since its formation. He is also the author and maintainer of kernel-package, which is used to create debs of the Linux kernel. Russ Allbery is the lead maintainer of lintian, a tool used to automatically check packages' compliance with Debian policy, and to warn about potentially poor packaging practices. Junichi Uekawa is the author of the pbuilder tool, which helps ensure better compliance with build-time policy by making it easy to do package builds in a minimal environment. He is also the author of the Library Packaging Guide, which is one of the recommended introductions to packaging recommended in the new-maintainer process. Andreas Barth is the lead maintainer of the developers reference, a member of the technical committee, one of Debian's release managers, maintainer of the turmzimmer scripts for tracking release critical bugs, and other things. Margarita Manterola did an analysis and explanation of the various states a package can go through as part of installation and upgrades, which is currently available through the Debian-Women wiki [0] and which resulted in a long dormant bug in dpkg being discovered and fixed. (Note: while Junichi has indicated interest in being involved in a policy team, he's been busy on unrelated matters so hasn't had the opportunity to give a final yay/nay; obviously anyone can decline the delegation at any time, so I've decided to stick his name in the initial delegation anyway) In comparison to the original delegation in June 2005 [1], the above doesn't include an explicit chair (though the policy team can create one if desired), and only includes the authority to create policy, not to publish authoritative findings of compliance or non-compliance. To the best of my knowledge, that latter power hasn't ever been exercised, and it's instead been left to groups and individuals using tools such as lintian, pbuilder or piuparts to find and report problems, or targeted searches for flaws such as Martin Michlmayr's rebuild of the archive with gcc 4.1 earlier this year, or Dunc-Bank's search for RC bugs. Two of the five people listed above are members of the technical committee, which I believe is aligned with the concerns relating to separation of powers outlined in Branden's delegation. Matt Zimmerman is otherwise occupied with Ubuntu and other projects, so is unable to dedicate time to participate in Debian policy maintenance at this point and hasn't been re-delegated. In so far as I was concerned that the policy delegation was being used to avoid working towards a consensus on technical policy, I've been reassured by subsequent discussion both on the -project and -vote lists and off-list that no one has any intention of letting that happen. The new policy team have my full confidence and support in their technical decisions and in their ability to help others contribute to policy, both individually and collectively. Cheers, aj [0] http://women.debian.org/wiki/English/MaintainerScripts [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00017.html -- Anthony Towns Debian Project Leader
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