Re: Thinking about Delegating Decisions about Policy
On Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 09:17:59AM +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> I have come to wonder if these two functions shouldn't be separated, in
> different bodies (eventually with different nomination rules, etc.). This
> "steering" question had also been phrased, slightly differently, by Mehdi,
> during his DPL term, with the idea of a "Roadmap team". [As I understand it, a
> Roadmap team would pilot the Debian ship with a vision on how to sail the
> sees, where the TC, when "steering", decides on a case-by-case in a ship
> without captain]. Uncomfortable, for political and availability reasons, the
> TC declined to take that role back then.
I hadn't looked at it from that angle before, but you're right. In fact,
if you look at other distributions, they all have some form of a
steering body: Ubuntu has their BDFL, Fedora has the FESCo, OpenSUSE has
an elected steering body, and FreeBSD has their core team. I'm sure much
of this is true for other distributions as well.
Debian does not have a body like this. In some way, this is a feature;
we don't have an overarching body that says "X, not Y", and therefore we
do both X and Y, and people can just use what they want. Sometimes,
however, that doesn't work; when X and Y conflict, we need someone to
choose one of the two options. The TC indeed isn't really set up to do
this properly, but it gets closest, and therefore it gets to do the job
by default.
If we are going to make a "steering committee" of sorts, however, or
adapt the TC so it can take the role, then I do think we should keep in
mind what our historic behaviour has been; that is, that we usually
allow multiple options to coexist, and that that isn't necessarily a bad
thing as long as they either don't conflict, or a default can be chosen
without too much disagreement.
--
To the thief who stole my anti-depressants: I hope you're happy
-- seen somewhere on the Internet on a photo of a billboard
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