On 17/11/14 at 11:15 -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: > §6.3.6 does not prevent the CTTE from being presented an issue early. It > stops the CTTE from deciding an issue before a consensus approach has > been attempted. In this particular case, I felt that a consensus > approach had been attempted when this issue came up for a vote. This > particular bug has been open since May, and was discussed at length. > > In retrospect, the CTTE may not be working consensus hard enough, and > for that, I'm sorry. Working to achieve consensus is very difficult, > time consuming, and fraught. It takes a huge time commitment, and even > after spending the time, the CTTE may still have to make a decision. > > I had naïvely assumed that making what I thought were technically > defensible decisions was good enough. Clearly, enough people in the > project disagree, and want the CTTE to work harder on consensus first > before deciding. This is probably going to be a bit controversial, but I'd like to point out that if we look at Debian's history, the TC has been alternating between being perceived as "too much focused on consensus => takes too long to make decisions" and "not seeking consensus enough, makes decisions too quickly". For example, if we look at recent (FSVO recent) history, there was only one TC resolution passed between 2009-09-04 and 2012-02-05 (the lilo one, #587886). And I remember quite a lot of discussions where people were complaining about the TC not making decisions quickly enough, on #573745 (python maintainership) for example. I think that one important thing to remember is that the TC is asked to make difficult decisions, and that it is often hard to find the right compromise between spending more time seeking consensus, and making a decision sooner. I am not saying that the current way the TC works is perfect, but I think that we should be careful, when trying to improve the situation, not to jump to the opposite problems. > I'm already working to rectify that in the case of #766708, and I'm > certain we could use more help finding consensus with #750135, and maybe > even #741573. If this is something you (or anyone else in the project) > feels strongly about, please, work with the CTTE to help find consensus > on these issues, so we don't actually have to decide. +1 Lucas
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