Dear Steve and Bdale, Given that the current status of the current "lenny firmware" vote is that it will go forward, I would appreciate if the DPL and/or the Project Secretary could rule on the following issue. In the discussion about the vote various people have argued that a vote for "further discussion" would mean that the Release Team (RT) can go forward with the release of Etch as it would not change the current situation where the RT (as delegates) decided - by setting lenny-ignore tags on the relevant bugs - that the firmware issue is not a release blocker. Others have argued that the RT is not empowered to make that decision and thus that some real resolution regarding the firmware question by the project by means of a GR is required before Lenny could be released. My personal opinion is that, given that the project effectively decided two times in a row by GR (in votes 2004/004 and 2006/007) to allow an exception *for a single release only*, that no single developer, package maintenance team, or group of delegates is empowered to make or extend such an exception for/to later releases. IMO the current RT made a judgement error when they decided to assign the lenny-ignore tags to the relevant BRs, especially as that was done without any kind of consultation of the project at large. This is coupled with a more general feeling that no single delegate or delegated team should decide on issues that are so fundamental to the project or that have proven to be so controversial in the past as the firmware question [1]. This argument is less strong than the previous one as it has less formal basis, but is something that I currently intend to investigate further after Lenny has been released (e.g. during DebConf). I've decided to ask the DPL and project secretary to rule on this issue based on the following considerations: - the Project Secretary is the guardian of the constitution and thus the correct role to rule on consequences of previous votes; - the DPL has delegated the function of release manager, and thus of the release team which grew out of it, and is thus the correct role to rule on empowerment of that team in general. A ruling before the end of the voting period would be appreciated. Cheers, FJP P.S. Please note that I am actually in favor of Lenny being released without the need to resolve open firmware issues, but I also feel it should be done for the right reasons. [1] This is complicated by the fact that I feel the RT _is_ empowered to rule about ignoring RC licence-related bugs filed in cases where the issue is much more limited in scope, such as in the following example: http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2008/07/msg00378.html
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