Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Philip Hands writes ("Re: Replace the TC power to depose maintainers"):
>> this NOOP,
>
> I'm very surprised to see you say that you think this is a no-op.
>
> ISTM that in the current argument, the TC has given the position of
> the existing maintainer great weight.
>
> Imagine the roles were replaced. Imagine the actual petitioners (P
> and W, for the same of argument) were the current maintainers, and the
> actual current maintainer (R) were a petitioner saying "please make me
> the maintainer". Would the TC would spend months debating before
> dismissing such a manifestly unfounded petition ?
Ah, that's what you mean -- that's not what your GR said though, as far
as I could tell.
The way I read it is that we should not give special status to the
arguments presented based on the maintainer status of the person putting
forward those arguments.
You now appear to be saying that we should not consider maintainership
to be in any sense sticky, and should instead assume that the package is
orphaned when it's presented to the TC, and assign the maintainership as
if we're blind to its history at the end of the process.
Those seem like barely related positions, and the latter is nothing to
do with what you wrote in the draft GR.
> As I've said I genuinely find the TC's behaviour incomprehensible.
> But this is not limited to this TC; all previous TCs have had similar
> issues (from my point of view). As I say the TC members are all smart
> and good people so I don't think the problem can be changed by a
> change of personell. I definitely don't want you to resign.
>
> Can you explain why the TC is so reluctant to depose or overrule
> maintainers ?
I have been pondering this since you raised it.
There is research to show that groups of people tend to express opinions
as a group that are more extreme than the centre of gravity of the
opinions of the individuals.
It seems it happens because people tend to assume that the centre of
opinion is further along whatever spectrum one is talking about than
they are personally, and so adjust their expressed opinions to match,
and thus everyone's perception of the centre drifts further in that
direction.
I wonder if the TC does this in the dimension of something like
reasonableness, patience, politeness, conciliation, or some such
I suspect that if I'd been acting alone in a situation where I was only
answerable to myself that cases would have been dealt with in one
exchange of mails. ;-)
I'm not sure how one might fix that, but it's not going to be by adding
extra rules and metrics that one is expected to measure one's
performance against. That would just add another thing to think about
instead of acting.
Add to that the fact that the individuals involved all tend to be
sporadically busy and the discussion ends up running at the pace of the
person that can give it the least time, which also militates against
decisive action.
Even if the obvious action is to replace the maintainer, that would
always do more good if done instantly than after a pause of months, but
that's pretty-much impossible to achieve via a group of busy volunteers.
Once months have gone by, the situation normally becomes less clear-cut,
because one has already lost the benefit of a snap decision.
I don't think any of that is particularly unique to the TC, and would
equally apply to anything that you might be tempted to replace it with
(unless the replacement were a single individual, or an algorithm).
Cheers, Phil.
--
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