On Thu, Dec 10, 1998 at 09:21:37AM +0100, J.H.M. Dassen Ray" wrote:
> > Like it or not, if you were the Debian Project Leader then all of your
> > publicly expressed opinions and actions would be perceived as that of
> > Debian.
>
> Having been involved in Debian both under a non-quiet and a quiet project
> leader, I'm still not sure which I prefer. Perhaps a middle ground between
> Bruce and Ian.
I sincerely hope I fit into "middle ground"... I've been looking at the
archives to get a feel of how Bruce did things and I don't want to run the
project like he did. I think he would have annoyed me more often than I'd
have liked. =>
> Bruce once said "Debian is a political organization, and that's a *good*
> thing". I tend to agree. In the cases where Debian needs leadership, both a
> sense of timing and a reasonably fast response time tend to be important.
> The response has to be the right one though, so some form of consultation
> with the Debian Group Mind (TM) is appropriate. It looks like this would be
> easy in Joseph's case, as he's often found on the #debian-devel IRC channel.
If a response were needed immediately, I would still have developers on irc
as a quick resource for at least a few opinions, but really I wouldn't feel
comfortable speaking for the project on a matter that I didn't know the
project agreed with. Doesn't mean I'm going to not do a thing without
consulting everyone--far from it--but I won't go around doing things that
might really annoy people in and outside the project without being sure the
project as a whole or at least a majority of it agrees with me.
> Take for instance the KDE licensing issue. IMHO, it took too long for us
> internally to come to a conclusion. This might have been sped up under more
> hands-on leadership. Once that conclusion was reached, it was acted upon
> quickly though.
I think I annoyed a few people durring that discussion when I brought the
issue up on -private. However I should point out that we discovered less
than a week after I did this that we had reached a consensus and needed to
act on it.
> > The only reason I bring this point up is because I have noticed that you
> > are quite active on Slashdot. Would you be willing to limit your posts in
> > highly-visible public forums such as slashdot to topics and opinions that
> > we can all be comfortable with as representative of the Debian viewpoint?
> > In other words, a relatively quiet DPL is a good DPL. A different alias
> > would allow this while still allowing you to express yourself fully.
>
> I like Ian's approach to this, which is the other way around: use your
> regular identity for private opinions, and make a separate identity
> (leader@debian.org) when the Debian viewpoint is represented.
That's not always enough I'm afraid. I've commented elsewhere about that
too. Some things Ian has done with his account such as propose the DFSG2
have been taken as coming from Debian's leader even though they just came
from Ian, not acting as developer. Granted this is a controversial issue
and those who made a point to mention it are outside the project and were
using it to discount Debian's opinion because they wanted it to appear that
Debian was just a bunch of fanatic members of the church of GNU or something
like that, but it still did reflect.
And it reflected more because it took Ian awhile to reply to the arguments
made in the various threads. I don't know if it could have been helped in
this case, but it is a strong example of how sometimes things said by the
person who happens to be the leader will be taken as coming from the leader.
Not much can be done about it other than being aware of it I think.
> I don't think being Debian leader should be too much of an impediment to
> speak one's mind.
I wholeheartedly agree.
--
"I may be a craven little coward, but I'm a _greedy_ craven little coward!"
-- Daffy Duck
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