Re: NEW queue

[Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org>]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 02:55:19PM +0200, Thomas Viehmann wrote:
> and offering an apology acceptable to the release team. Debian has, in my 
> opinion, the obligation towards the people doing one of the hardest tasks 
> Debian has to offer (look at the number of people it has worn out) to not 
> tolerate that accusation. If there needs to be a discussion whether the 
> release team was working outside the scope of its authority here, so be 
> it, but the being depicted as betraying Debian's goals is beyond what the 
> release team can be expected to endure.

In my opinion, however, you have this backwards.  The release team
members (and this goes for any other core team as well) have privileges
which are withheld from the other developers for whatever reason,
and they have been granted such privileges presumably to serve the
project, not as some kind of reward or recognition for merit or industrious
service or brownnosing.

I imagine that these people have either explicitly pursued this
power or that it has been offered to them and they have explicitly
accepted.  Such conscious and willful acts should have been coupled
with conscious and willful acceptance that with this power comes
great responsibility.

This responsibility is not as a parent or caretaker for misbehaving
ingrates, but to serve every single DD who lacks those powers.  The
feelings of the privileged people should be secondary to the feelings of
the unprivileged people.  Their actions should be extremely transparent
and subject to review.  This includes not having secret back-room
discussions about project business.

Now if you were suggesting that we should all be civil to one another,
I would have a different argument, but what I infer from your words
is that we owe the release team more because of the work that they do.
The inverse is true: the release team owes us more because they CAN
do the work.

In my mind I can't conceive of why they would have willingly accepted
power if they weren't prepared to face the highest scrutiny and
criticisms.  Can you?