On Sun, Sep 05, 1999 at 03:07:48PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> Finally, I'd like to see proposal document updated to reflect what the
> constitution has to say about policy.
Personally, I'd rather see the constitution updated to reflect the Way
Things Work.
They're not, after all, all *that* bad. Sure, we had a whole bunch of
problems with /usr/doc, amongst which were:
* 'twas a complicated issue with no elegant solutions
* everyone didn't really know how to work with `formal objections'
* no one really knew how to work with the technical committee (IMHO
the -policy group looked on it as an easy way out, then a month
or so later realised they didn't have their act together either)
* we'd made a major change in policy that made no explicit consessions
to backwards compatability
We've come up with solutions (or at least countermeasures) to most
of these. First, `formal objections' definitely should be able to be
responded to, and withdrawn. That didn't really happen with this proposal,
and if it had, I suspect we'd have managed to get a consensus anyway,
eventually. Second, the technical committee at least has a working mailing
list and a chair now. We even, eventually, got a response. Finally,
we are at least considering making changes that say "the current way is
okay, but we'd prefer it if you did such-n-such", which IMO would make
changes like this one much easier to bear (witness the `-g' proposal,
for example. Ideally it wants major changes to every package, but it
doesn't complain about unmodified packages being non policy-compliant).
So I don't see a huge need for upheaval. I think the policy groups
(-policy and the tech ctte) are heading in the right direction.
> Personally, I'd hate to rewrite the proposal document without any
> input from the policy maintainers, and likewise, I'd hate to propose a
> constitutional change to match the current proposal document without
> even more input [enough to see that most developers are unhappy with
> the idea that technical decisions are better made by individuals than
> by large groups].
That's not quite the way -policy works though: it's not a "big groups"
versus "individuals" thing, it's a consensus thing. I'm not going to
attempt to define it more precisely than that: I'm sure I'd get it
horribly wrong and I think we've already got good enough means for
testing consensus anyway, and a definition would merely get in the way.
In particular, the policy group *does* decide on technical matters by
consensus, whether those decisions conflict with other packages or not.
Yes, suggesting major changes instead of demanding them is /better/, and
I'm sure we'll take that into account in future, but it's only really
important in one of a dozen (</pretend_statistics>) cases: we shouldn't
redo the whole of the -policy mechanism about it.
What I'd like to see is the technical committee and the DPL ratify the
powers of the -policy group, rather than try to impose changes from above.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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