Re: Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization
On Aug 31, Brent Fulgham wrote:
> We really need a system of representative decision making in
> Debian. We are too far into the Bazaar mentality, such that no
> decisions are ever made, and there are no responsible parties to
> decide when argument has been exhausted and *SOMEONE* needs to
> say "this is how it will be." While that may be distasteful to
> the true anarchist/libertarian types, the increasing length of
> time between releases and the overall slow grinding of our
> organizational gears shows that something needs to be done.
We already have such a person: the DPL. Furthermore, he is empowered
by the constitution to delegate his duties and decision-making
capacity to others (like the tech committee, although other groups
could be created).
OTOH, I can see an argument for an elected policy committee (to
replace the self-selection of -policy participants). Drawing the line
between technical and policy decisions, though, is a lot like
splitting the Gordian knot. After all, /usr/share/doc started as a
policy issue and became a technical issue... and doubtless the release
manager will get dragged into it as well.
What I don't see is the merit of functional groups with elected
leaders. Dividing by priority is kinda bogus (my guess is that 80% of
packages are in optional); dividing by grouping is also rather silly
(Do we really need someone in charge of electronics or comm? What do
we do with maintainers with packages in lots of groups?). I suppose
we could artificially divide the distribution (maintainers A-D vote
for one guy, maintainers E-G vote for another...) but then what would
these people do? Be the guy who gets to participate in flamewars as a
proxy for the others?
Perhaps what we need is a dispute resolution committee, with oversight
over everything (policy, technical, releases, whatever). Any X
developers (somehow related to the voting system's Q) could refer a
matter to this committee if a dispute isn't resolved in 1 week. I can
make a formal proposal if anyone's interesed (# of members, manner of
election, tie-breaking, whatever). Or at least we need a formal
mechanism for requesting that the DPL to resolve a dispute.
Chris
--
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| Chris Lawrence | Get your Debian 2.1 CD-ROMs |
| <quango@watervalley.net> | http://www.lordsutch.com/ |
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| Grad Student, Pol. Sci. | Visit the Amiga Web Directory |
| University of Mississippi | http://www.cucug.org/amiga.html |
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