Re: call for seconds: on firmware
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> Le dimanche 16 novembre 2008 à 12:43 -0800, Russ Allbery a écrit :
>>> It’s not that your interpretation of the Social Contract is flawed;
>>> but it is only your interpretation. The secretary is not a superhuman
>>> – unless he is leading a double life chasing evil aliens at night,
>>> but that would be irrelevant to Debian – and as such it would be
>>> inappropriate to consider only his interpretation as valid.
>> However, the Constitution does that, so far as I can tell.
> No. The Secretary has the power to interpret the Constitution (§7.1.3)
> but not the Social Contract.
Hm, good point.
In fact, looking at it from that angle, it looks like interpretation of
the foundation documents when it comes to work in Debian follows the
normal decision-making process in Debian, since it's not an issue of the
Constitution. That means that the primary decision rests with individual
developers doing their own work (section 3), overridable by the DPL or a
delegate of the DPL (section 5 and 8), which in turn is overridable by a
General Resolution (section 4).
Given that no GR has been passed to specifically override the release team
decision, I think it's fairly clear that a vote of further discussion
would leave the decision with the previous decision-making body, in this
case the release team as DPL delegates. There doesn't appear to be
anything in the Constitution that would allow anyone else to override the
release team's interpretation of the foundation documents. I think that
for a GR to be relevant, it would need to specifically fall under point 3
of section 4.1 (although I suppose one could read an action on the
foundation documents under point 5 to implicitly fall under point 3 as
well).
The GR we passed for etch says nothing about what we do for lenny and
hence couldn't override a release team decision for lenny.
Manoj, am I misinterpreting something here? The question isn't what the
SC says, but rather who gets to decide what it means and how it applies to
their work.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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