On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 06:32:19PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > It absolutely should. The constitution stipulates that authority flows from > the developers, through the DPL, to the delegated teams. To say that the > DPL delegation is nothing than a rubber stamp is to say that the team does > not recognize the constitutionally-defined power structures. I'm not a native English speaker so I can't comment on whether "rubber stamp" is an appropriate expression or not. But I definitely agree with what Steve wrote here. It's very important that any "substantial extra power" that a DD has wrt other DDs is tied to a delegation (and that, as such, it can be publicly revoked by the DPL if needed). The DPL is the only power in Debian that is periodically re-established via a vote among Debian citizens; it is fundamental that disparities among DD powers stems from him/her. Then, of course we can debate on what is a "substantial extra power" that need delegation and what is not. For one thing, I don't think that commit access to a package maintenance Git repo on alioth qualifies, especially considering that all DDs can bypass that "power" by doing NMUs. But I'm positive we can agree on the fact that teams like DSA, Ftp-masters, and the Release Team do have substantial more powers than DDs who are not part of those teams [1]. So, talking strictly at the level of general principles, I don't think that such teams should have the formal ability to self-delegate their powers to new team members. In practice, though, we need to be very careful of not getting in the way of working teams by imposing extra hops on how they work or, worse, trying to inflict on them team members they don't like to work with. It is important that we, as a project, have the *ability* to do that via the DPL, but I don't think we should actually *use* that ability, except in exceptional circumstances. (FWIW, I think this characterization of things should work is compatible with the explanation of "rubber stamp" that Ian has given in this thread. But meh, I'm an Italian living in a French-speaking country, what do I know about English linguistic subtleties :-)) Finally, I think implementing in practice the above principles, avoiding awkward threads like the beginning of this one, can be easy as long as we all adopt some simple communication best practices. Delegated teams can try to avoid announcing new team members before giving a heads up to the DPL; and the DPL can try to promptly acknowledge new team memberships as soon as they get public. This way the general "rubber stamp" principle is preserved and at the same time no DPL-team tensions are created. (Note: I've no idea on whether this has actually happened in this case or not. I'm only trying to address the general aspect of how "core teams" delegations should work.) Cheers. [1] yes, I know, the Release Team is currently not a delegated team. I think that is a bug that needs to be fixed, and I apologize for not having done that. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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