On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 05:36:45PM +0000, Martin Meredith wrote: > In debian, Membership implies upload rights, which is another thing that I think > that Ubuntu do well. Membership shouldn't be just for those that are DDs. I > think that membership (which implies voting rights) should be available to those > who provide a sustained contribution to the debian project. Whether it be > through Translations, artwork, advocacy, sponsorship, package maintenace, etc > etc. I'm not sure but wouldn't that add a lot of bureaucracy? I find it even hard to measure the contribution of a translator (amount of subversion commits against long diffs sent in per mail), even worse it is with artwork or similar, but sponsorship? Would every sponsor then be a DM or just those spending more than $money for it? For me that sounds like many new rules with very different opinions about what justifies a DM status. > In my opinion, there should be a distinct divide between being a Debian Member, > and a Debian Developer. I'm pretty sure that there are numerous people out there > who contribute to Debian in a significant manner, without actually doing any > package maintenance. I agree fully. There are e.g. translators who work for Debian for many years now and contribute a lot IMHO. But OTOH I think there are just a few who *only* do translation work without having the technical skills for going through NM. That's why I thought Debian could have something like an exception in NM what you would call "hand wave". That would definitely not work with every artworker, sponsor etc., though. > Along with this divide, I think that being a Debian Developer (hereby shortened > to the "defacto" DD) should imply Debian Membership. This meaning that someone > can apply to become a Debian Member (DM)) without having to become a DD, but > anyone who applies to be a DD should either be automatically granted DM status, > or have to apply for that first. > > I think that for Membership, a suitable board should be setup (or multiple > boards, in the case of an overwhelming amount of applicants) that, if a > concensus is met between them, would be allowed to grant DM status to a person. > Either that, or a prospective member would have to get a certain amount of DMs > to advocate their becoming a member, which could then become an automated > process. DMs would also have the opportunity to raise an objection to someone > becoming a member, at which point, it would then either goto the "board " for a > decision, or require the applicant to find more advocates. > > I don't think however, that this should be the case for becoming a DD. In the > case of someone aplying for a DD, I believe that they should either have to go > through NM as it stands, or have a "board" of people qualified to distinguish > the applicant's ability (say for example, FD + DAM, or similar) "hand wave" the > person through. > > I also think that the current "Debian Maintainer" should stay as it is (though > possiby be renamed to something like "Debain Code Contributor" (DCC), or work in > a similar manner to the DM process suggested above. Although I like your idea I'm not convinced that this is the right approach. You have good points; respecting more contributors can IMHO absolutely be a goal for Debian. But the way you describe would lead to many different states a contributer could be in which *I think* leads to more confusion instead of a clear membership system (which should be a goal for Debian as well). Two Maintainers could still be "simple" maintainers (meaning not being DDs with full upload rights) but one of them has voting rights while the other one doesn't because one of them applied to become a Member. Both of them had advocates to become a Debian Maintainer -- why would those advocates refuse to support their becoming a Member with voting rights? And the other way round: why would people not become a Member of Debian without even knowing general points of the project? ...I should probably stop writing, it confuses me even now... do you support a "New Membership process" for DFSG, DMUP and such stuff parallel to NM for technical stuff? I think I don't see where this is going but even that makes me think that it's already too complicated/sophisticated... isn't it? Hauke
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