Re: BITS from the DPL For September/October 2019
On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 03:19:03PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> We've now had several years of essentially declining to make a decision
> and trying to see if the project can muddle through, and while I feel
> somewhat vindicated by the fact that this didn't immediately fall apart
> and has sort of worked, I think it's becoming increasingly untenable. We
> now have contributors who are far-removed from the original debate and who
> may have only used a systemd-based Debian system and we do not have clear
> project consensus that sysvinit support is mandatory in new packages, so
> the support is starting to bitrot, and given the lack of clear project
> guidance, no one is clearly empowered to prevent it from bitrotting.
Hear hear.
While I was reading Sam's message, I was a bit apprehensive about having
a vote about this; but his arguments, and yours, make sense in that it
is a good idea to either tell people we're no longer interested in
multiple init systems as a project, or to empower those who want to work
on it that we, as a project, think it is a sensible idea to do so and
that not supporting alternative init systems should be considered an RC
bug.
(FWIW, even though one of my packages doesn't currently have an init
script where it should, I happen to think the latter is true; but it has
become very clear to me over the past few years that this opinion is far
from common in the project, and that is precisely the reason why this
vote would be a good idea).
Having said that,
Sam: I notice that you've not sent a draft of your GR proposal to the
-vote mailing list yet. It has been my experience over the years that
that is not generally a good idea. The DPL does have the power to bypass
much of the GR procedure, and in urgent situations this is probably a
good thing; but I believe that the drafting of GR ballots in the open on
a public mailinglist is actually an essential part of the whole GR
procedure, which allows people to form an opinion together, resulting in
fewer (but better) options on the ballot.
It is times when we are divided, such as in the case of GR 2004_004,
that this process breaks down and the number of options on the ballot
skyrockets. This is also the reason, I think, why ballots that are
drafted in secret almost always immediately receive amendments as soon
as they are proposed, thereby negating any perceived benefit that they
might have provided.
For that reason, I would like to urge you to draft the ballot in the
open, unless you think there is little time for this and you need to
have something to move forward urgently -- which would be something I
would disagree with.
Thanks,
--
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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