On 16/09/14 01:00, lee wrote:
Shall we have a vote? AFAIK, there's nothing that would speak against having one, in this very mailing list. Why not ask the users? Why should only Debian developers be allowed to vote but not the users?
Quite aside from the general DEbian principle of "do-ocracy":The Debian Developers are a strongly-identifiable group; as I understand it, becoming a DD requires an existing DD to vouch for you, and certain key activities performed by DDs require the use of public-key cryptographic signatures using a key which has been signed by other DDs to indicate that they believe it is indeed your key. One of those activities is casting a valid vote on a General Resolution.
The Debian Technical Committee is a strongly-identifiable group within the group of Debian Developers, to whom certain kinds of dispute may be referred for resolution. Being selected from among the Debian Developers, their identities can be verified in much the same way.
(Obviously, a DD's cryptographic keys could be compromised by social engineering attacks or malware infection of the computer on which they keep the keys. However, they are at least a *starting* point for believing a vote to have been legitimately cast.)
Debian users, on the other hand, are very much *not* a strongly-identifiable group; there is no formal mechanism whatsoever for being endorsed as an Official Debian User. As such, a vote "by the users" can, *at best*, be a vaguely indicative straw poll of those bona fide users who feel strongly enough about matters to participate in the first place; at worst, it will be a magnet for trolls, astroturfers, shills, and other such reprobates.