On Thursday 2008-10-23, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 12:18:01PM +0000, cobaco wrote:
> > IIRC the last time this came up people could name 1 or 2 non-packagers
> > who had ever bothered with NM
> >
> > -> while it is theoretically possible for non-packagers to go through
> > NM, quite obviously it's currently not worth the pain in the opinion of
> > the vast majority of non-packagers.
>
> That's because NM is inherently broken, and we should not make people
> being able to circumvent NM to the price of being lesser folks. Being a
> DD is harder every day, whereas we should make it more accessible.
>
> Creating casts is going to solve nothing. Except give titles to some
> people who right now have none, whereas they should be DD.
If random Joe Developer has no commit rights to dpkg, it doesn't make him a
'lesser folk', it just makes him not involved in that aspect of Debian.
The same goes for upload rights, or any other role-specific privilige.
Now there's priviliges like voting or access to debian-private (or maybe
that's a punishment as reffered earlier :) that should IMO be granted to all
long-term contributors, regardless of exactly what role they fill within the
project.
Other priviliges should only be granted to those who need them, commit,
upload and admin rights on debian servers all seem to fall in that category.
So we have the current proposal. It makes becoming an official member of
Debian more accessible -> that's a good thing.
It also names a number of standard roles with associated priviliges. That
has absolutely nothing to do with castes and more/lesser folks. It's just a
way to differ between the general and various role-specific priviliges.
So how about we just drop the boatload of titles for various roles and just
rephrase the whole proposal as:
- if you want to be able to get <privilege> you need to do <list of things>
(-> with currently 3 sets of priviliges defined:
- general member priviliges: vote/debian-private/@debian.org adress
- upload priviliges to specific package
- general upload priviliges)
- everybody with general member rights is a Debian Member (or whatever other
title we want to hang on 'official project member)
That clears up the whole communication thing with external parties.
For internal Debian stuff, the access someone has is better desribed by
whatever team(s) he's part of anyway. I don't see a particular need to
officially have a name for various kinds of teams wether that's packagers,
translators, doc writers or whatever. A lot of people cross those boundaries
anyway, so need little categories they'll be not. (For those who do care
I'll wish you happy bikeshedding on the names and makeups of the various
groups and leave you to it)
All in all I find the current proposal to be a huge step in the right
direction, and something that's long overdue.
> The more steps you add, the sooner people will stop. IOW less and less
> people will become full DDs, and instead of bringing new blood to the
> project, you bring new blood to the "lesser" contributors and deplete
> the core contributors (sorry to make such distinctions between full DDs,
> lesser or core contributors, it's what people try to make it about, not
> what I think of it). Instead, we should just have a world split in
> three: Users, Contributors (User that reports bugs and does occasionnal
> patches or similar stuff), Developers. Translators, people helping with
> the website and so on, any people that does _regular_ help to the
> project just deserves to be the latter. The fact that it requires NM for
> all of them is pure nonsense.
I think we agree :)
> As of the "sacred upload rights", FWIW, I think we shouldn't give DD
> status to any people that is going to abuse his uploads rights when he
> should not. It's 10x less likely that a translator will NMU a package
> out from the blue, than a clueless DD will NMU a package and screws it
> badly. I've never heard of the former[0], I've seen the latter a couple
> of times.
however unlikely non-packagers are to abuse upload privilige sooner or later
someone will (not necessarily intentionally). Like commit rights or DA-
access, only giving upload rights to people who need it makes most sense IMO
--
Cheers, Cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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