Re: Question to all candidates: officiousness
On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 12:14:05PM -0500, Clint Adams wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 05:43:41PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you mean by this question, or what the point is.
>
> I will clarify. AJ obviously feels that it is his prerogative (under
> which hat or set of hats, I do not know) to decide which set of
> architectures in the archive are worthwhile,
That would be the ftpmaster hat, I presume.
> and what manner of supplication or "wowing" is necessary to change his
> preconceived notions on these matters.
>
> You may recall the amd64 issue, where numerous reasons were given why
> this architecture could not be incorporated officially under exactly the
> same criteria as every other architecture which had preceded it.
> Possibly there was some "blowing away" that occurred either before,
> during, or after the time that AJ was paid a sizable sum of money to do
> some work that was arbitrarily deemed necessary for amd64 inclusion by
> some unnamed member or members of the ftp-team.
AIUI, no blowing-away occurred; rather, he hadn't had time before, and
being paid to do so allowed him to do the work on this rather than
finding some paid work to earn a living instead.
[...]
> Now it is unclear which hat AJ is wearing when he implies that he is
> authorized to decide which architectures are important, by criteria he
> decides unilaterally. I am curious as to what the other candidates
> think: is it appropriate for him to do this, and, if so, which
> positions of authority or achievements have earned him the "moral" right
> to do so?
>
> As for the point of my question: I find this behavior to be highly
> arrogant and offensive, and will be ranking AJ below NotA because of it.
> In order to vote fairly, it is important to know the attitudes of the
> other candidates in these matters.
It is the responsability of the ftp-masters to guard what gets into the
archive. This does indeed need to be guarded, because even with the SCC
split adding additional architectures at random isn't necessarily a good
idea. Disk space may be cheap; bandwidth isn't always, and adding
another architecture requires several gigabytes in both disk space and
bandwidth.
While I may find his choice of words unfortunate and do consider the
kFreeBSD port to be worthwhile, I don't disagree with the basic premise
that we can't just drop in every random port that doesn't add value.
In that light, I do not find such behaviour either arrogant or
offensive.
> Does that clear up everything for you?
Yes. Does this also clarify my position enough, or would you prefer me
to answer your seven questions?
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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