Re: Proposal G
On Tue, 1 Jun 2004 10:19:15 +0200, Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org> said:
-------- Reaffirmation of the social contract - priorities
> are our users and the free software community
> We, Debian, reaffirm that our priorities are our users and the free
> software community. We keep to that, both are our priorities. We
> don't intend to give one of them up for the other. We strongly
> believe that, in the long run, their interests are the same.
Nice, but irrelevant.
> For our users, we promise to do regular releases; as a guideline, a
> major release of the distribution should happen about once a year.
On what basis do you think we can make this promise?
> For the free software community, we promise to use the Debian Free
> Software Guidelines as guidelines for the software that is allowed
> to go in the Distribution ("main" on the ftp-mirrors).
That excludes the current Sarge release. And thus we would
need to eviscerate sarge.
> We know that, as with every guidelines, there are border cases were
> these guidelines don't really match. We promise to use our common
> sense in this case to get to an appropriate result. We will use our
> guidelines in a way that serves our users and the free software
> community, and we don't intend to blow our guidelines up to full
> legal texts, because we aim to create the best operating system,
> consisting of free works, and not a place for lawyers-to-be.
I have no idea what that means.
> Furthermore, by this decision, we overrule the decision by the
> release manager in
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/04/msg06588.html and
> re-inforce the release policy that was valid prior to this
> date[1]. Of course, the Release Manager team is authorized to adjust
> the release policy.
> [1] still available as today on
> http://people.debian.org/~ajt/sarge_rc_policy.txt ------------------
That policy violates the SC. You essentially told a delegate
to go violate the social contract, and I don't think we can do that.
If you mean this position statement to explicitly overrule
a foundation document, you must say so; and then it would need a 3:1
super majority.
I would also advice you to clean up this proposal; there is
not time period for how long the social contract is to be violated
by the project, and we should remove promises we have no idea
whether we can keep, no plans that have even been considered as to
how we could possibly change that.
As it stands, I do not think that this proposal meets the
requirements for helping determine the changes in release schedule
of sarge in voew of GR 2004_003; therefore I think it may need to go
on a separate ballot (since it is there fore a separate issue). I
need to think about it more before making an official ruling on
this, and I am open to being persuaded either way.
manoj
--
Are Linux users lemmings collectively jumping off of the cliff of
reliable, well-engineered commercial software? Matt Welsh
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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