Re: Technical committee resolution
On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:07:15 +0100, Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net> said:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 06:28:26PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> >> Any tech ctte member worth their salt would be involved in Debian
>> >> beyond maintaining packages (if for nothing else to demonstrate
>> >> they are qualified to be tech ctte members).
>>
>> > I would think that in a project with 1000 alleged active members,
>> > we could easily limit privileged access to one instance per person
>> > without any serious problems.
>>
>> We could. We could also choose quite another set of silly criteria to
>> limit various and sundry things by. The question is, why? Why one? A
>> better criteria is not to limit oneself by arbitrary number games,
>> but see where the maximal benefit to the project lies. If one person
>> has the time or energy to manage one hundred hats, and do a better
>> job of them than other candidates, why deprive the project due
>> Clint's law of pointless limitations?
> How do you know where the *maximal* benefit to the project lies, if so
> many paths to benefit are never explored?
By eliminating all people who hold at least one other hat in
Debian seems like eliminating paths, not exploring them.
> How do you know that one person has the time or energy to manage N
> hats?
Look to see if they are active in their job, and in this case,
if they participate in ctte activity. This is not rocket science.
> Or, how do you know that we wouldn't actually improve their
> performance in N-M tasks if we take away M unnecessary tasks?
Who is we, kemo sabe? If you go about arbitarily taking tasks
away because you decide people should only do one task, I think you'll
find people's motivation drops at such draconian decisions on high. Go
ahead. try it.
> How would you really know that they are doing a better job than other
> candidates when there is an inherent general limit imposed on the
> number of seats, and when there are circumstantial advantages of some
> candidates, all of which gives some people more chance to prove their
> worth over others and/or limits other people from showing what they
> can do?
I don't. But I am not creating a general rule to exclude people
who, for instance, have more then one package in Debian, since
obviously they are overburdend.
I am also not eliminating people who have been in debian for
more than one month, since people burn out in time, and longer people
are in Debian, they'll burn out as tech ctte members.
> Yet, if you deprive those who want N hats of the possibility, they
> might get lost completely. Or taking away M tasks won't have a
> positive effect, but a negative one. Even worse, it might not have a
> straightforward effect, so we might not be able to clearly decide if
> it was right or wrong. And if we don't utilize the circumstantial
> advantages such as specific experience in a task, we risk wasting too
> much time rehashing issues that had already been dealt with in the
> past.
So, you think we should explore the route of excluding all
people from positions of responsibility in Debian who do not use
debhelper, who have more than on4e package, and who have been around
longer than a month? They have more time. They are new and
enthusiastic. They have untied ideas. They want to change the world,
usually.
Or are only my proposals silly, but limiting people to one hat,
not being my proposal, can't ever remotely be silly?
Faugh.
> All these unwieldy circumstances make the decision on the criteria a
> matter of judgement.
> And speaking of judgement - his proposition was to reconsider some
> rules based on a few data points, and it was reasonably mild and
> open-ended. Yet you dismissed it as silly, arbitrary and pointless -
Bullshit. I did not dismiss his original proposition that people
might be overburdened as silly -- I dismissed his one hat proposal as
silly. I just suggested that not all the people on the ctte seemed to
meet the overburdened criteria.
Or else, we should take the enthusiastic, unburdened, single
package owning new brooms to sweep the tech ctte clean -- since of
course no proposal can ever be silly, no?
> all much stronger words than his.
Some words are stronger than others.
> IMO, people on whose judgement we depend on to make important
> decisions for the Project as a whole should put more emphasis on
> trying to understand other people's perspective than on engaging in an
> antagonistic debate. And again, whether that opinion of mine is
> relevant is a matter of judgement for the observers...
I think I do understand Clint's maverick stance better than you
credit me for. I suspect I understand his position better than you do
-- we have spent quality time together driving out for groceries
ranting about powers that be in Debian.
So take your own advice, and undersant that I might have a
different stance than the one you are jumping to conclusions about.
manoj
irritated now
--
Whom the mad would destroy, first they make Gods. Bernard Levin
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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