Re: Tentative summary of the amendments

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

Hi,

On 10/24/2014 02:02 PM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Aigars Mahinovs <aigarius@gmail.com> wrote: 
>         On 24 October 2014 12:35, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:
>         > In fact, they want to require that if P supports only A (and not A|B)
>         > that the maintainers of P have to patch P to make it support B. In the
>         > good old days[tm] it would be the responsibility of the people wanting
>         > to use B to submit patches to make P work with B (but here I suspect
>         > many people demanding support for B do not even use P[1]...).
>         
> And this is exactly why this GR is moot: it contradicts the
> constitution. Even if it passes, you couldn’t force maintainers of A
> (systemd) or P (GNOME, KDE, Xfce) to maintain B (systemd-shim) or fix
> bugs in B.

I don't think it contradicts the constitution: we do require certain
work to accept packages in Debian, like removing non-free stuff,
document copyright holders and licenses, making the package build on
buildds, ...

However there needs to be a fairly broad consensus about these
requirements and, if you change the requirements, people willing to
actually do the work. Otherwise we end with this:

> Eventually, bugs in B would result in RC bugs in P that the release team
> would have to ignore because P is too useful.

Which is why I think this GR is a bad idea...

Ansgar