Re: Call for seconds: DFSG violations in Lenny

[Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>]

* Robert Millan (rmh@aybabtu.com) [081027 16:15]:
> Option 1 (reaffirm the Social Contract)
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 
>    1. We affirm that our Priorities are our users and the free software
>       community (Social Contract #4);
> 
>    2. Given that we have known for two previous releases that we have
>       non-free bits in various parts of Debian, and a lot of progress has
>       been made, and we are almost to the point where we can provide a
>       free version of the Debian operating system, we will delay the
>       release of Lenny until such point that the work to free the operating
>       system is complete.

The headline is tendious. I would expect after "reaffirm the Social
Contract" that we indeed want to release Lenny to our users and not
withhold it.

Perhaps replace it with "delay Lenny indefinitly".



And I want to remind all of you that the default option is that the
release managers can decide to make a case-by-case-exception to any of
the rules in the release policy, for the simple reason that as time
passes by, it get too late to fix some of the bugs. To give an example,
I can remember well that during release of Sarge, we noticed on Saturday
(that was while already the cd images were partially done) that the
upgrade of sendmail will stop delivering any mails in the queue, but due
to the options we had (either skip the release for at least another
week, or deliver this version of sendmail and document it in the release
notes) we decided to not stop the release. Such things can happen with
any part of the release policy, and I think that's the adequate
behaviour.

In case any of the proposals get enough seconds, I would propose then:

| Debian's priorities are our users and free software. We don't trade them
| against each other. However during getting an release out of the door,
| decisions need to be done how to get a rock stable release of the high
| quality Debian is known for, release more or less on time, and to
| minimize the usage of problematic software. We acknoledge that there
| is more than just one minefield our core developers and the release team
| are working at.
| 
| We as Developers at large continue to trust our release team to follow
| all these goals, and therefor encourage them to continue making
| case-by-case-decisions as they consider fit, and if necessary
| authorize these decisions.


Cheers,
Andi