Re: Technical Committee discusions (was: Re: /usr/doc transition and other things)
On Tue, Aug 31, 1999 at 03:44:07PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Raul Miller wrote:
> > First off, I'm not sure it's a good idea for policy to be a rapidly
> > changing entity.
>
> It's not a good idea at all, but as Manoj pointed out it's now changing
> rapidly.
>
> > Debian produces packages -- policy is a means to that end.
>
> No, policy is a means of doing quality-control.
Agreed.
> > Second, there is the mechanism of the techical committee. The committee
> > is set up to be able to turn around a decision in a week or less,
> > once the groundwork has been laid. The current situation [with the
> > FSSTND->FHS directory migration] is taking longer than that, but it's
> > hardly a normal situation.
>
> Why is it hardly a normal situation? I fail to see this.
Well,
(1) The technical committee should have been asked to approve the the
original 3.0.0.0 policy change. Looking at the constitution, and at
our current policy, everything which would result in a new major policy
version number ought to be approved by the technical committee before
it's released.
(2) The technical committee is just getting itself together. We've had
a number of problems with stale email addresses to work out, for example.
(3) My daughter was in the hospital last week, which stalled the voting
process for almost a full week. [I had agreed to prepare the ballot,
then didn't have the time to do it.]
I don't consider any of these to be normal.
> The way I see it is that policy is made via consensus on
> debian-policy. I can see that you might want the ctte to bless a
> policy-change before a new version of debian-policy is uplaoded, but
> it should not set policy. In fact the constitution states at various
> point that creating policy should not be done by the ctte. The ctte
> comes into action when there is a conflict, either via section 6.1.2
> or 6.1.3 in the constitution. In this case there is such a conflict,
> and it is taking the ctte *weeks* to come up with a decision.
I agree, to an extent. The committee has the right to set policy (see
6.1(1)), but procedurally they're supposed to leave the detailed design
work to other people (package maintainers/developers -- including the
debian-policy maintainers).
The way I read the constitution, the policy group doesn't have the right
to set policy which declares existing packages buggy (any policy which
bumps the major version number should have this property). It appears
that they're supposed to get technical committee approval before releasing
such policy.
> At this stage I'm tempted to invoke section 5.1.3 of the constition
> and make a decision based upon the strategies that were discussed here
> earlier and rethink how the technical committee should work, since it
> looks like it is not working the way it is supposed to.
The current technical committee vote will be over next Sunday, or earlier
if our other three members (Ian, Guy, Klee) vote before then.
--
Raul
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