On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 09:50:58AM -0700, Bdale Garbee wrote: > Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes: > > It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it is hard for developers to > > respect the TC’s decisions when we see disrespectful sentences like the > > one above from some of its members. > I agree. > We are of course each entitled to hold opinions about such things, but I > would strongly prefer if we could all try *very* hard to keep such > assertions out of TC discussion. They have no place here. I recognize that we as TC members have a moral duty to not gratuitously demotivate Debian contributors. However, the duty to not alienate contributors is secondary to our duty of defending the technical integrity of Debian, and so I stand behind that comment and am going to elaborate with reference to an example so that the other members of the TC, and the GNOME team, understand exactly where I'm coming from. (The example is from a question that was referred to the TC in July 2012 - bug #681687 - so it may ring a bell for some here.) For several years the GNOME Team ignored section 9.7 of Policy, concerning integration with the MIME handling system. They did this in favor of implementing the related freedesktop.org on the grounds that the fd.o standard is technically superior (and less work, since it was already implemented upstream). As it happens, I think the fd.o standard *is* technically superior (and I think any other member of the TC who looked at the question would agree). However, "my way is technically superior" is not a valid justification for ignoring Debian Policy. Policy is not *just* about being technically better, it's *also* about having consistent behavior that all packages in the archive can coordinate around. No single upstream, no matter how large or prominent they might be, has any business dictating behavior that contradicts Debian Policy; Debian exists as a distribution to provide a coherent, integrated OS, not to deliver half a dozen incompatible upstream experiences to our users, and when Policy needs to be changed it needs to be changed with transition handling in mind. Each Debian maintainer has an obligation to ensure their packages comply with Debian Policy, regardless of what direction upstream is headed in. Sometimes this means writing compatibility code that's Debian specific; sometimes it means getting Policy changed so that packages have new, better rules guiding their integration. Never does it mean silently ignoring the issue as The Other Maintainer's Problem. In case anyone missed it at the time, https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/01/msg00830.html is the start of a very long thread on this topic two years ago, when it came to the attention of the wider project that Josselin had dropped support for mailcap from evince, the single pdf reader that many Debian users had installed on their desktop. (Other packages, such as the eog image viewer, had dropped their integration long before, but with a lower impact than evince.) What struck me in that discussion is that at no point did the GNOME maintainers raise this issue on debian-devel or debian-policy to ask for help with this integration problem. Instead, they uploaded breakage to the archive and waited for users to trip over it, apparently in the belief that if no one had provided a fix by now - /for the bug they had not asked the developer community for help with/ - that such an automated system was not important enough to worry about complying with policy for. (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=658139#29) Ultimately, bug #497779 and bug #658139 were resolved by someone volunteering, in response to that thread, to implement an automated tool for merging .desktop files into mailcap for backwards-compatibility. This was the desirable outcome all along; however, it happened in spite of the GNOME Team, not because of them, and after a fair amount of good will had been spent on both sides in the list discussions. I completely understand the GNOME Team not having time to write (or maintain) the tool to do this automated conversion. What I don't find acceptable is their not bringing this issue to the project's attention /and asking for help/. Maybe 'obstructionist' is not the right word. But the GNOME Team has a pattern of failing to engage constructively with the rest of the project around crucial integration issues. Josselin claims that a comment from a TC member calling this out makes it difficult for developers to respect TC decisions. I counter that the GNOME Team's past handling of such problems shows an existing lack of respect for project values and procedures, and I'm merely giving voice to a view widely held among Debian developers who would in fact be more than happy to contribute to improving GNOME's integration in Debian, if only they believed this help would be welcomed by the current package maintainers. While I stop short of calling for the formal censure of the Debian GNOME Team as Ian has in the past, I think the GNOME Team should take a hard look at how their own actions have contributed to any sense they might have that they lack the resources to comply with Policy. I don't think it's a coincidence that over the past two years, over a quarter of all the issues decided by the TC have related to GNOME packages. To reconnect this with the actual point of this subthread: it is entirely possible that the TC will decide that systemd is the technically better solution for Debian to move forward with; and any member who thinks this should certainly vote accordingly. But if the members of the TC do *not* think this is true - if, indeed, our collective preference is for upstart rather than for systemd - then I don't think we should be swayed by assertions that GNOME upstream is tethering itself to a specific init system and that the current GNOME maintainers may force the issue by uploading packages to the archive that have a hard dependency on systemd as PID1. That's nothing more than hostage taking, especially when there would be no difficulty getting cycles for the integration bugs with GNOME and whatever init system Debian standardized on... *provided that* the GNOME maintainers showed themselves open to this work instead of blocking it. From Joss's reply to my message, it seems altogether too likely that he *would* block such work. But that is a bridge we should cross when we come to it, not something we should allow to drive the future course of Debian... nor something we should beat the GNOME Team up about before it's actually happened. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature