Re: Ready to vote on 2004-003?
On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 04:46:30PM -0400, Buddha Buck wrote:
> Raul Miller wrote:
> > The major difference between most of them as to do with expiration of
> > that this "not result in a situation" condition.
>
> I think I understand what you are trying to say here, but I cannot parse
> this sentence at all. I get a little further in parsing it if I assume
> that "as" should be "has", but I get stuck again later in the sentence.
Ick, sorry about. I'll try that again:
The major difference between most of them has to do with expiration of
that "*not* result in a situation" condition.
The quoted bit is from this sentence:
>>>If would be nice if he would reveal whether one of the proposed
>>>resolutions would *not* result in a situation where he would be
>>>comfortable with releasing sarge with non-free firmware blobs in
>>>main.
> You are probably right that there is such a disconnect. The problem
> with "I'll do what you tell me to do" is that the existing situation
> arose in part because there was a significant disagreement among the
> voting developers as to what they thought they were telling Anthony to
> do. It appears that many, including Anthony, read the changes in the
> Social Contract as telling Anthony that Sarge had to be purged of
> non-Free documentation, images and sound without source code, etc, that
> prior to the Social Contract change Anthony had tentatively accepted as
> allowable. Many other people, on the otherhand, did not see, or did not
> think, that the proposed changes in the Social Contract significantly
> altered it's instructions ot the Release Manager as to what was
> acceptable or not in a release.
Maybe.
The confusing thing is set of people who apparently say:
[1] The Social Contract is too permissive.
[2] non-DFSG documentation, images and sound should be removed from main.
[3] non-DFSG documentation, images and sound should be left in main.
It seems to me that people from this set are asking Anthony to tell them
which of the proposed amendements "address the issues".
Except, of course, I'm oversimplifying.
> If the developers instructions were unclear, and interpreted in a
> reasonable but perhaps disagreeable manner, I don't think it's
> unreasonable to for the developers to ask how their (proposed)
> instructions will be interpreted so that there isn't further
> miscommunication.
Anthony has already stated that under the old social contract he felt
these packages could be distributed and under the new social contract
he felt they couldn't. So it's not clear what question remains.
As an aside, I argued some random DFSG issues on debian-legal recently
(some correctly, some mistakenly). Opinions differ, there, but no one
seems interested in considering GFDL licensed documents which contain
invariant sections as DFSG free. Which comes back to: what question
is really being asked, here?
> It is entirely the case that Anthony's interpretations could lead to
> another series of changes to the proposals to better reflect the will of
> the developers. I think it better that that happen now, when the
> proposals are easy to change, than later, when it takes a 3:1 majority
> to change the Foundation Documents again.
How so?
What is "surprising" or "unintuitive" about Anthony's interpretations?
> > In other words, I think the questions being posed are, at best, too
> > vague.
>
> OK, how about:
>
> Anthony, assuming Raul is correct in that you are saying "I'll do what
> you guys tell me", and you are being asked "What will you do?", what do
> you think the various resolutions instruct the Release Manager to do?
"What will you do?" is too generic. It represents zero thought and zero
effort and there's no way to tell when the question has been answered
properly.
> Specifically:
>
> 1) Which options do you interpret as allowing the RM to release Sarge
> with substantially the same content and schedule as it would have had if
> the Social Contract hadn't been modified earlier this year?
Consider proposal A. This would allow Sarge to be released from
the current freeze, as long as the release can be completed before
September 1. If there are any major delays (serious bugs discovered
at the last minute or whatever) pushing it past September 1, then it
couldn't be released.
If there are any serious problems in any of the non-DFSG packages after
September 1, fixes for those problems will not be releaseable.
Is there anything about this that you couldn't figure out on your own?
> 2) Which of the options given in your answer to (1) do you interpret as
> allowing the RM to authorize maintenance (point) releases of Sarge until
> a new stable release is made?
Again consider proposal A -- what do you think?
If someone is putting together a page that provides answers to these
questions based on what Anthony has already said, and they have some
questions that they feel they can't answer, I think it would be reasonable
to pose those questions. If Anthony disagrees with the answers which
are posed, I'm sure he'll speak up.
But asking Anthony to write that page is a bit much.
> 3) Which options do you interpret as preventing the RM from authorizing
> maintenace (point) releases of Woody until Sarge is released?
Same issue here as above.
> (Not on the list of questions related to this set of resolutions, but
> for my own interest: Are point releases of pre-Woody releases being
> made? Or has their support lifetime ended? What is the general policy
> of the support lifetime of old releases?)
There have been infrequent point and security releases for Woody.
There isn't a sweeping policy on this issue so much as there's a "if
people put energy into it, it gets done" "policy". Security problems
get more attention than compatability issues, for instance.
> 4) Which options do you interpret as allowing the RM to release
> post-Sarge stable releases with the same sort of contentious material
> (GFDL'd manuals, source-code-less images and sound, etc) in the same way
> that such contention material was allowed in Woody?
Take a look at proposal A again -- isn't asking that question about
proposal A kind of silly? If not, why not? If so, how is asking that
question about proposal B any more relevant? Etc...
> I'm sure there are other questions which could be asked, but are these
> quesions sufficnetly non-vague?
Not in my opinion.
--
Raul
Reply to: