On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 01:41:35PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote: > The current Technical Committee is inactive; in the past two years they > have only made two rulings: > > * 2004-06-24 Bug #254598: amd64 is a fine name for that architecture. > * 2004-06-05 Bug #164591, Bug #164889: md5sum </dev/null should > produce the bare md5sum value. > > The md5sum ruling was a bug submitted, referred and decided by the > Technical Committee chairman. In effect, he used his power in such a > manner to expect that any bug he files will lead to a tech-ctte > decision. Well, in the spirit of full disclosure, let's recall that you were a party to the discussion as well. Without dwelling too much on this particular bug report, my general principles would tell me -- were I both the technical committee chair and the submitter of a bug report that got referred to the technical committee -- to abstain from the committee's deliberations on that issue, and ask the committee to appoint one of my fellow members as a provisional chair to serve in my stead for that particular arbitration. > Do you believe that the tech-ctte should be relatively inactive? Or do > you believe that an inactive Technical Committee is a bad thing? Depends on why it's inactive. If it's inactive because the Project is good at sorting out technical disagreements without resorting to them, that's good. If it's inactive because there is a general lack of confidence in the Technical Committee to cope with issues submitted to it, that's bad. If it's inactive because the Technical Committee's rulings are not respected even when made, that's *really* bad. The last case veritably screams for a constitutional amendment to disband the technical committee, or a GR to (attempt to) re-populate it with more trusted individuals. > If the latter, do you propose (as they would be your delegates) to make > any changes to the current make-up of the committee. The Technical Committee are not delegates of the Project Leader. They are an independent body. Section 6 of the Debian Constitution[1] details their powers and appointment. My first action as DPL with regard to the Technical Committee, as it would be with every critical body in our Project, would be to contact them and ask them what they feel the challenges facing them are, and to ask them how I can help them meet those challenges. I could also attempt to solicit the opinions of the Developers regarding the Technical Committee, but unless the TC is causing significant problems, engaging them with an end to reform would not be a high priority. Again, my actions would be guided by the diagnosis made per my reply to your inactivity question, above. [1] http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution -- G. Branden Robinson | The first thing the communists do Debian GNU/Linux | when they take over a country is to branden@debian.org | outlaw cockfighting. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Oklahoma State Senator John Monks
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