Hey all,
So we had some discussion on the private list about some possible changes
to the way the tech ctte works to make it a little more responsive and
effective. It looks like there's some consensus on the following:
(1) Rotating the tech ctte chair
Changing chairs every two months would mean everyone would be chair over
the course of the year; helping ensure that we notice people who aren't
active in a timely manner, and distributing the load a bit more fairly.
I propose we do this, and for concreteness propose the following rotation:
- Feb 14th Ian Jackson
Feb 15th - Mar 31st Steve Langasek
Apr 1st - May 31st Bdale Garbee
Jun 1st - Jul 31st Anthony Towns
Aug 1st - Sep 30th Raul Miller
Oct 1st - Nov 30th Andreas Barth
Dec 1st - Jan 31st Ian Jackson
Ordering generated by:
for a in "Raul Miller" "Bdale Garbee" "Steve Langasek" \
"Anthony Towns" "Andreas Barth"
do echo $(echo $a | sha1sum) $a; done | sort
with Ian left out so everyone gets a shot at being chair before he's
chair again, and Manoj left out since he's currently secretary and 2.1(2)
of the constitution requires the DPL, secretary and tech ctte chair
to be separate people. Manoj would have been between Steve and Bdale;
Ian would have been between Bdale and me.
I'm not particularly attached to the above ordering, if anyone has any
particular preference, that's fine by me. I'm not sure if having an RM
be tech ctte chair just before a release is due is a really good thing
or a really bad thing. :)
(2) Requiring an implementation of proposals
The md5sum "decision" is still languishing after a year and a half, and
the contrary proposal has been in stable for over six months; I think
we'd have an easier time and be able to avoid these things if people
provide full patches with their proposals, and we make our decision by
uploading an NMU with the appropriate patch applied.
If there's no patch available, we could still offer advice, just not
make a decision on how the maintainer should act. This also provides an
easy way to ensure we're not doing technical design ourself (by making sure
it's already been done).
So I propose we establish a rule that we won't make decisions on issues
that aren't ready for an immediate NMU when we make that decision.
(3) Advisory opinions from the chair
On the other hand, I think we should make it quick and easy to get
opinions from the committee too; so if a maintainer has a particularly
tricky issue and wants someone to have a look over their work to see if
they've missed something important, they can talk to us about it without
having to go through a ridiculous amount of process.
The easiest way to do this seems like having the chair give out an
advisory opinion on behalf of the committee when an issue's raised, and
to let that stand as the committee's opinion without the formality of a
vote or a formal tech ctte decision -- at least until someone else on
the ctte disagrees, or a maintainer definitely needs to be overruled.
Adding this to the chair's responsibilities/powers seems reasonable
assuming we rotate the chair fairly regularly.
So I propose we establish that our procedure in addressing issues is
for the chair to quickly issue an initial opinion; and to only vote on
issues when an official ruling is needed (eg, to overrule a maintainer)
or when members of the tech ctte disagree.
Thoughts, comments, agreement, disagreement, etc appreciated. Obviously
I'm in favour of each of these :)
Cheers,
aj
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