Re: Censorship in Debian
On Monday, January 07, 2019 07:06:28 PM Russ Allbery wrote:
> Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> writes:
> > On the other hand, the IETF seems to do just fine - with a much larger
> > base of participants, and a lot more room for discussion and debate on
> > contentious issues. Global infrastructure, with distributed ownership,
> > lots of stakeholders, all held together by agreements, with the decision
> > processes open to pretty much anybody who shows up. The process puts
> > pretty much everyone else to shame - with lots to be learned from it.
>
> Speaking as someone who is a listed author on three published RFCs and
> chaired one IETF working group, I will take Debian process over IETF
> process any day, and find your description of the IETF pretty
> entertaining. :)
>
> Also, please note that many IETF participants are paid as part of their
> job to participate in the IETF. (We keep coming back to that.) That's
> true of some Debian contributors as well, of course, but I strongly
> suspect the percentage is lower.
Similarly here (also three RFCs, but never chaired a working group).
The IETF rough consensus model is very useful in many circumstances. I've
used it successfully in multiple settings outside the IETF to great success in
both moving technical work forward or driving decision making in a closed
group to closure. It's not relevant to the problem a group like the Debian
tech ctte has, however.
Groups like the tech ctte have a different problem than an IETF working group.
They have to make final decisions on things that affect the project as a
whole, many of which are not amenable to consensus building (as an example,
the init system decision was going to be sysv init or not sysv init - there
was no middle ground).
I'll also remind you that the IETF process as a whole is not whoever shows up.
IETF working groups and IETF last call are open processes. IESG decision
making is not. You can have all the working group consensus you want, if
there are uncleared discusses against your draft, it's not moving forward. If
you want a comparison, the tech ctte is a lot more like the IESG than an IETF
working group.
Scott K
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