Bug#741573: #741573: Menu Policy and Consensus

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> writes:

    Bill> On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 10:08:04PM +0000, Sam Hartman wrote:
    >> In March of 2014, Charles Plessy asked the Debian Technical
    >> Committee to review one of the policy editors decisions to revert
    >> changes to how policy talks about the Debian Menu and MIME
    >> support.  See http://bugs.debian.org/741573 for the TC process
    >> and https://bugs.debian.org/707851.  for the process within
    >> debian-policy.
    >> 
    >> One of the issues is the question of whether the Debian Policy
    >> community reached consensus around the proposal.  I've
    >> investigated this question as part of trying to understand how I
    >> will vote within the TC process.

    Bill> I want to point out that I have split the menu policy changes
    Bill> in 3 parts, so that the less controversial part could be
    Bill> decided separately, see #742532.  However nobody was
    Bill> interested in seconding this. So I am let to believe there is
    Bill> no actual consensus on this.

I agree that there doesn't seem to be consensus on your proposed split.

I don't think I can infer anything about the overall proposal's support
from lack of support for the split.  As an example, if I had high
confidence that I could get consensus on the entire proposal, I would
not generally support handling the less contraversial parts first.

If you handle the less-controversial parts first, it's easy to get into
a situation where that's all you solve.  When you do that because you
honestly can't get consensus on more than the less-controversial parts,
the process is working.  However, sometimes those sort of splits can
create dynamics where you get less of a solution than you might hope.