On Fri, Aug 06, 1999 at 11:57:16AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> 2) People used the `formal objection' mechanism to stop the answer just
> >> because the didn't like. I don't think this was right. And the people who
> >> did it are starting to realize that too.. =)
>
> Joseph> too-many-chiefs syndrome, I think the policy mechanism has
> Joseph> shown itself to be open to blatant abuse.
>
> Abuse? The mechanism was designed for implementing
> non-controversial topics of technical policy. The fact it does not
> work for controversial topics is not surprising, and I would hardly
> call it ``shown itself to be open to blatant abuse''.
But it has been abused, quite seriously. Popularity contests HAVE been
used to defeat sound technical solution to a purely technical problem.
Given that the policy guidelines are not meant to resolve technical issues
of any controversial nature, they're pretty much limited to fixing typos
and there's no point to needing proposals and seconds for that.
Structure is good to keep things moving, but the individual developers
need to be able to be part of it. OTOH, what we have now is essentially
chaotic bureaucratic process, with all the faults of such systems such as
the now month or so we've been arguing over this and gotten nowhere. In
fact, if anything IMO we've taken a few steps backwards in the process.
Of course this is all 20/20 hindsight.
> That depends. For a purely technical issu, if a hundred people
> like a flawed proposal, and one person finds a serious technical
> flaw, then the proposal needs to be seriously modified, or dumped.
>
> Popularity is not necesarily a metric of technical
> correctness, or even merit.
We apparently need to find some way to deal with controversial technical
issues. A month's senseless flaming and then appealing to the technical
committee is going to get slightly annoying.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux developer
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I can just see it now: nomination-terrorism ;-)
-- Manoj
haha! i nominate manoj.
-- seeS
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