Re: Overriding vs Amending vs Position statement

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Matthew Johnson <mjj29@debian.org> writes:

> I was trying to demonstrate that there are things which are in
> conflict with a foundation document and that something needs to be
> done about vote options which are such conflicts but don't explicitly
> amend that document.

Oh, okay, sorry.  Yes, I do agree with that.

> The solution could be as you say that they are therefore non-binding
> (although I don't see that is is a _useful_ solution, see Don and
> Manoj's posts to this thread, it's at least _consistent).

I've posted in the past why I think it's useful, but I'm assuming people
have seen that and just don't agree with it.  It's certainly not as
useful as making a binding 3:1 decision, but there are cases where we
*can't* make a 3:1 decision because no option has a 3:1 majority.

> It could be that they need 3:1 to pass whether they are explicit
> modifications to the document or not (which is what I always thought
> was the case), or it could be that they are binding even without a
> super majority (and it's this view I was trying to address here.
>
> All of these are consistent views held by several of the contributors
> to the various threads, and all of them consider that to be what the
> status quo is. I wish to clarify it one way or another

I think the first option (that they need 3:1 to pass whether they're
explicit or not) just begs the question and therefore won't solve any of
our problems unless we also identify a specific body who decides what
does and does not modify foundation documents, which in practice is
identical to defining a body that states what the foundation documents
mean for all developers.

I just want to be sure that we don't separate those two out, since if we
do we're not going to solve the problem.  We're just shuffling it
around.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>