Re: Moderated posts?
Hi,
I was there at the time that the issue was referred to the tech-ctte, and I
read all of the posts to that bug at the time, as well as all the parallel
discussions taking place on debian-devel.
I can assure you that your interpretation of the first 10 comments is entirely
wrong. Tg and paultag are arguing over whether the tech-ctte should rule on
whether multiple init systems should be supported. If you read the eventual
outcome of the tech-ctte, you will realise that they *did* rule on that, and
we *are* supporting multiple inits. So tg's position *actually happened*.
> Let me (Steve Litt) paraphrase this: "We've used sysvinit for way too
> long, but now, all of a sudden, we just can't wait anymore, and must make
> our selection RIGHT NOW, with no further investigation." Nice!
This is a completely wrong interpretation. Lucas was advocating for the tech
ctte to investigate the issue, which is a LONG way from "let's make a selection
right now". "All of a sudden" is a complete fabrication as well, since the
issue had been burning for ages, there have been countless discussions about
init systems on -devel leading up to this point, even more so than on -user
right now.
> I'll stop there, but suffice it to say that I've scanned most of it,
> and in every case, people with the password and the authority stifled
> those who said "wait, there are problems here, let's find different
> alternatives"
Except, as I point out above, the exact opposite happened to what you claim
here, and at no point was any DD prevented from raising a GR if they so wished.
Precisely one of thousands did, but it did not attract enough seconds from
fellow DDs.
You are perhaps not aware of how the tech-ctte works. It's a committee,
consisting of a finite set of people, who rule on issues that are *referred to
them*: they do not self-select things to discuss. It's one tool in the box to
resolve technical disagreements in Debian. GRs are another. The tech-ctte
conducts its business entirely in the open, by using a pseudo-package in the
BTS, and bugs. That URL is the bug for the tech-ctte discussion. The use of the
BTS is to ensure transparency. A side-effect is there is nothing to prevent
others from throwing their 2p into the discussion. However that's not the right
venue for others to discuss the issue. -devel is, and you can be sure that
there were *plenty* of posts there too. (nearly every post to the bug was CCed
to -devel anyway).
If it seems that tech-ctte members are dismissive of people posting to the bug,
be aware that posting to an in-discussion tech-ctte issue is akin to shouting
from the public gallery of the House of Commons: it's not the way to get info
to the representatives. Please also be aware that there was nothing new raised
by anyone in that bug; every issue, every point had been discussed in great
depth, many times, on debian-devel leading up to the tech-ctte discussion.
> But when I saw the decision making process revealed by this thread, I became
> deeply distrustful of the top people in Debian.
The tech-ctte exploration was extremely thorough, entirely transparent and I
cannot think of any example of a more transparent decision making process in
any other Linux community. Not only that, but the entire decision could be
overridden by a GR, which *any* developer could raise, at any time (and still
can). And the eventual outcome wasn't "there will be one init system", which
would be *considerably* easier for the project to manage, but that we support
*multiple* init systems! A tremendously more complex task. Red Hat aren't doing
that. Fedora aren't doing that. Ubuntu aren't doing that.
Crikey, messages like yours as so demotivating. Well-meaning they may be, and
innocently misinterpreting the situation they may be, but they suck the life
and enthusiasm out of us almost as much as the trolls do.
--
Jonathan Dowland
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