On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 02:15:42PM +0200, Leo costela Antunes wrote:
> While I mostly agree with the wording and the spirit of such a text, I
> fear it might add little to the existing necessary reading (policy,
> devref, etc) and be seen by those reading ans signing as merely one more
> bureaucratic hoop to jump through.
FWIW, I rather think that it adds a lot. Our current applicant
documentation has a lot to say about how to package, but very few to say
about the release process itself. You can argue that it is a topic that
can be added to such documents, but at that point it would be just one
extra section in the pool; that would be rather underestimated wrt the
importance that the release process has in the life of developers.
In that respect, I think the additional benefit of the pledge would be
increased by encouraging people to fix RC bugs other than theirs.
> Do you imagine it being enforced in any specific way? Or simply being
> mentioned, for instance, by the QA team when orphaning someone's
> package? Something like "you didn't abide by the pledge, so we're
> orphaning your package".
Is the declaration of accepting the social contract enforced in any
specific way? The point---as I see it---is making people think about
what they sign, not about having a contract on the basis of which
retaliate later on.
> OTOH, I'm not against it on principle and believe it could be added to
> the first steps of NM/DM without getting in the way, just as the current
> DM-intent-email seems to include "I've read and agreed to ...".
Given that more often than not applicants learn new stuff during AM, I
would rather have the pledge signed at the end of the process, when
applicnts will probably be more conscious of what they are signing.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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