Re: [nm-admin] Identification step in the current scheme (Re: Fear the new maintainer process)
On Tue, Aug 01, 2000 at 09:09:39PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>
> A privilege is a "special advantage or immunity or benefit not enjoyed by
> all" (wordnet). You said "the privilege to be trusted to contribute to
> Debian". Many people outside Debian are to be trusted to contribute,
> directly or indirectly. In fact, most contributions to Debian are
> indirectly. Without those, Debian wouldn't exist in the first place, and
> couldn't develop much.
[Cut the rest of the text that had to do with Marcus' debate about
Nils' points]
> However, this very reason (privilege) was raised to argue that the NM
> process can be a bit harder than it needs to be:
>
> "Membership is a privilege, and if you have to take a couple of
> bureaucratic steps, so be it."
I apologize. In the above-mentioned quote, the word I really was
looking for was responsibility. Replace privilege with responsibility
in the above and I hope my point becomes clear. We are responsible for
the packages we maintain. This responsibility is not to be taken
lightly. As I described elsewhere in this thread, as a debian
maintainer, you can unleash considerable mayhem in distributing
packages with trojan horses and such. Having given me (the maintainer)
this sort of *privelege*, the least that the organization can expect
is that they have an appropriate id on me.
In addition, I do think Debian membership is indeed a privilege. The
privilege to be part of a large network of volunteers working together
to produce an excellent operating system. And I think I am not the
only debian maintainer that feels this way.
--
Gopal Narayanan <gopal@debian.org> <gopal@astro.umass.edu>
Debian GNU/Linux Developer
Dept. of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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