Re: Technical committee resolution
Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net> writes:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 05:10:27PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I do agree with Ian, however, that the tech-ctte is one of the worst
>> examples for limiting hats for a slightly different reason: the
>> tech-ctte needs to make decisions for the project that the project can
>> then implement. Yes, this has been a weakness already, but one way in
>> which that could be addressed is by having *more* tech-ctte members who
>> are on core teams so that they can go make the resolution happen.
> I have to say that the word that ultimately sprung to my mind after
> reading this paragraph for the second time was - oligarchy. I know, I
> know, it's a far stretch from reality, but still, the idea doesn't quite
> sound so appealing if you look at it with that potential result in mind.
I don't have a huge problem with oligarchies for technical projects.
Debian isn't a country or a government, and there are governance styles
that can work for technical projects that don't work for things with more
day-to-day control over people's lives.
That being said, I'm not particularly in favor of an oligarchy either, and
in practice, Debian has some real problems with work being blocked on a
small number of people that we should fix, and that probably require
becoming less oligarchical to fix.
> But, let's disregard that for a moment, and recall the earlier topic of
> a perplexing issue that tech-ctte decided, the wordpress stable security
> situation. If the tech-ctte which was deciding that had included someone
> who was on the security team, and someone who was a maintainer of such
> PHP applications, do you think that such a tech-ctte would have come to
> a better decision? I'm not sure. I can't say that I would expect the
> existence of either expert on the committee improve the odds that
> wordpress security bugs would get handled differently a year later - we
> don't have any way of expecting that these people would be active in
> that situation long after the decision.
Well, if it tied in with Joey's idea of making someone responsible for
following through on the decision, it would have made that process easier.
But you're right, outside of that hypothetical, I don't see it helping
that much for that decision.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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