Re: Policy delegation
On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 11:29:48 +1000, Anthony Towns <leader@debian.org> said:
> Hi, I'm withdrawing the "Package Policy Committee" delegation made
> by Branden in June last year, in:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00017.html
> That leaves debian-policy maintained by subscribers to the
> debian-policy mailing list, according to the process described by
> the "policy-process" document in that package. TTBOMK recent
> versions of policy have been maintained using arch as the revision
> control system of choice, and are available from:
Much has been made about leadership of the Debian project in
the recent past. In my opinion, the quality of the leadership depends
on the judgements the leaders make. Rescinding te delegation is the
project leaders prerogative; butbasing the decision on no concrete
actions decries haste and a lack of judgement I find deplorable.
Given that there is no delegated power to change the technical
policy, I can only see that the technical policy may be changed by a
GR, or by the technical committee. 6. Technical committee
======================================================================
6.1. Powers
The Technical Committee may:
1. Decide on any matter of technical policy.
This includes the contents of the technical policy manuals,
developers' reference materials, example packages and the
behaviour of non-experimental package building tools. (In each
case the usual maintainer of the relevant software or
documentation makes decisions initially, however; see 6.3(5).)
5. No detailed design work.
The Technical Committee does not engage in design of new proposals
and policies. Such design work should be carried out by
individuals privately or together and discussed in ordinary
technical policy and design forums.
The Technical Committee restricts itself to choosing from or
adopting compromises between solutions and decisions which have
been proposed and reasonably thoroughly discussed elsewhere.
Individual members of the technical committee may of course
participate on their own behalf in any aspect of design and policy
work.
======================================================================
I understand that before we kind of carried on an non
constitutional process in which a subset of developer changed policy,
which worked as long as there were o protests. But since we did have
a delegation for almost two years now, I do not think such
un-constitutional processes are tenable. So thepolicy editors have no
right to upload any new manual, unless the constitutional issues are
clarified by the project.
Mind you, this is not what I wanted -- I am in the process of
reviewing the use of must, and should, in the technical policy, and
trying to remove the glaring errors and mistakes in our current
policy -- but this undelagation ties my hands. So, while I am
willing to do the work, and have done so fairly competently since 998
(goodness, that is 8 years in 5 more days), I no longer think I, or
any non tech-ctte delegate, has the constitutional authority to
modify policy.
Since it would be unfair of any one who has write permissions
to the policy to upload a technical policy without proper
constitutional authority, I suggest the project decide how routine
technical policy updates are going to work, and change the
constitution accordingly, or the project leader formally delegate
(heh) a whole mailing list of varying constituents the authority to
modufy the technical policy given under the constitution only to the
tech ctte.
Or, perhaps, the tech ctte can directly take over the policy
manual, as provided for by the constitution.
manoj
--
If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied
harder. Pope John Paul I
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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