Re: Policy process

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Jason Gunthorpe writes ("Re: Policy process"):
> I also object, I find Manoj's argument about 20 some-odd policy jobs to be
> a rather compelling reason to think this is a bad idea. .

You'll have to remind me.  It's some time since we had this discussion
the first time round and your search term hasn't produced any hits in
my mental database of arguments on this subject :-).

Apart from the problems with the current process making mistakes (both
of commission like the `unplanned' FHS change and of omission like my
bug about .so files.), there is another serious problem which I hinted
at in the other discussion.  At the moment this mailing list is hard
to use because it is full of administrivia.

I've now done a bit of research about this, prompted by the fact that
when I visited -policy in my newsreader today for the first time in a
few days there seemed to be very little of any use and a lot of noise.

I arbitrarily chose an article number in my spool to start at, and of
the 38 messages since then I have here there were:

 Substantive discussion - total 10 messages:
   4 posts about proposals at least slightly disputed or discussed
   3 articles discussing the policy process itself
   3 proposals of obvious minor coorrectness changes

 Procedural traffic - total 28 messages:
  13 `me too' posts (aka `seconded')
  12 notifications from the BTS.
   3 diffs of agreed, obvious, minor correctness changes

This mailing list is two-thirds noise required by our poor process !
With my proposed process this would have looked like this:

 Substantive discussion:
   4 posts about proposals at least slightly disputed or discussed
   3 articles discussing the policy process itself

 Procedural traffic:
   1 announcement of intent to make 3 obvious minor correctness changes

(The initial proposals about the obvious changes like those to the
mailing lists mentioned would have been directed by the BTS to the
relevant editors, who would have seen immediately that they were good
obvious and could have simply posted a single message covering them
all.)

The real purpose of this list - discussion of the technical merits of
proposals - cannot be served by a mailing list with so much junk.

Ian.