Re: Lifting the moratorium
Hi Timo,
On Sat, Aug 26, 2023 at 01:32:25AM +0200, Timo Röhling wrote:
> Practically, lifting the moratorium means that the CTTE relinquishes
> control of the /usr-merge transition to whoever drives the
> transition, i.e., maintains that living document and thereby makes
> decisions on how to proceed.
Yes.
> Who is this going to be? Do you, Helmut, feel comfortable as driver?
Yes, though I'm not opposed to sharing the load.
> Do you prefer if the Release Team takes over with you in an advisory
> role? If you continue as main driver, should the DPL formally
> delegate that role somehow?
Isn't this "just" a transition? I mean it's a larger one spanning
multiple releases and it's one that will not migrate to testing in one
step, but other than that, it is a change affecting many packages in a
coordinated way which is what we usually call transition. A transition
bug probably is a good idea, but other than that, transitions are
usually managed by those doing the work without exercising
constitutional powers. I sincerely hope that we as a project can get
this done in a consensual way without requiring the use of
constitutional mechanisms to make it work. Yes, there have been a lot of
bad feelings and even questionable actions and so forth about this, but
on a lot of sides I also see an interest to listen to each other and
cooperation. People who formerly have indicated to be too annoyed by
this matter to consider discussing it start doing so again. Why not try
another time to put trust in our community? The worst thing that could
happen seems to be us messing up the transition and making some systems
unbootable until we figure out a solution. Given dumat, we can likely
keep that out of trixie. If things fail that way, we can still consider
the use of more constitutional powers, but I'd rather see us getting
done without needing them.
On a micro level, the Release Team will be involved. The plan is for me
to file RC bugs. There will be disagreement about such bugs and the
Release Team is the arbiter of severities and testing migration here.
> I think these are questions we need answered, because it would be
> advisable to have someone with clearly defined responsibilities at
> the wheel for the transition. Otherwise, we risk stale-mating
> ourselves with endless debates on how to finish the transition
> "properly".
I'm surprised. We did have some contentious questions such as whether
changing dpkg would be part of the solution and how the bootstrap
protocol should look like. These seem settled now. Beyond these, the
feedback mostly was that we should simply get it done. We will still see
individual disagreements on particular packages, but those cannot be
settled by some form of delegation as in effect they touch the package
ownership and overriding that currently requires CTTE involvement.
I'd rather see us not using the constitution hammer just because we see
a nail and hope that I'm right about the expected cooperation.
Helmut
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