On Sunday 18 March 2007, Erinn Clark wrote: > - Stratification > > As a subset of the power structure thing, one of the other issues I > foresee is a "some developers are more equal than others" thing > happening. I'm having a hard time thinking of how to explain this, > because it's a bit "télétubby", as Joss would say, but I think there > is ample world history that supports the idea that caste systems > negatively impact societies, unless you're in the upper caste. We already have a de facto caste system, if you look around you'll find that pretty much the only people who are DD's are those who package stuff. We have lots of other long-time contributors who translate, write documentation and so on, yet very few of those become DD's. -> there's different levels and ways of involvement in the Project, but the current privilige structure does not really reflect this at all, any step in the direction of changing this is a Good Thing IMO. Elsewhere in this thread [1] it was pointed out that we have 2056 unique maintainers. Yet we only have 1013 people who had voting rights at the beginning of march [2], and NM currently lists only 106 canditates "in process". -> 2056 - 1013 - 106 = 937 non-DD-maintainers who are not in the NM queue. Now I don't know how many of those have been involved with the project long-time, but obviously we have lot's of packaging contributors who don't bother with NM. > - Trust and upload rights > > I don't think upload rights should be given out trivially, the proposal doesn't give out full upload rights, it gives out upload rights on a specific package that the person in question has been maintaining through sponsored uploads for a long time anyway. As documented elsewhere in this thread in such a situation the sponsor normally has gotten to trust the skills of the sponsoree (in respect to that package at least), so that he only gives the package a more and more cursory glance. -> in effect al the proposal is doing is make official the de-facto trust that's already present (and doing that in a way that lessens the workload of both long time sponsors, and long-time sponsorees) > but I also think that if you've got upload rights, you might as well > have full rights > and if you've already proven that stuff, then, again, you may > as well be a full-fledged developer. Not necessarily, for example, I'm a non-DD maintainer for 1 package (since may 2005). Now my package (desktop-profiles) is about as simple a package as you can have. While I'm perfectly aible to deal with that particular package, it's no given that I'd be able to deal with say the packaging of a library. So whereas I've proven that I'm able to deal with the packaging of 1 particular package, I haven't proven that I'm able to deal with more complex packaging. -> while a good case can be made for me getting upload rights for my 1 package and only my 1 package, the same is not true for upload rights on the whole archive. > And what happens when the DMs realize they can't vote (but want to) and > that they now have to complete NM anyway? the same thing that happens now for translators and other non-DD long time contributors, they either decide that DD-priviliges are worth going through the whole NM-process or not, the difference being that if they decide it's not they can continue working on their package(s) withouth having to jump through any unnecessary hoops for each upload. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/03/msg00084.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/03/msg00009.html [3] https://nm.debian.org/ -- Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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