On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 05:41:28PM +0000, Anthony Towns wrote: > "Text marked as a citation, such as this, is rationale and does not form > part of the constitution. It may be used only to aid interpretation in > cases of doubt." -- from appendix B in the constitution. OK, I didn't remember that (documented) convention. No objection then. > Take the current members, Ian, Bdale, Steve, Andi, Russ and Don are all > over five years and are in roughly that order of seniority iirc. On Jan 1st > 2015, assuming no resignations, then: [...] > ie, I guess I was thinking that were all considered simultaneously so > ordering wasn't relevant. In fact, I don't mind simultaneity, I just wanted to be sure it wasn't something that had been overlooked. I do observe that simultaneity might result in more expiries than in scenarios in which you either define a specific ordering, or members that would have been in the expiration set voluntarily step down before January 1st. > Oh, hey, since there's already math in the constitution, maybe it would > work to say something like: > > Membership of the Technical Committee is automatically reviewed on > the 1st of January of each year. At this time, the terms of the N > most senior members automatically expire provided they were appointed > at least 4.5 years ago. N is defined as 2-R (if R < 2) or 0 (if R >= > 2). R is the number of former members of the Technical Committee who > have resigned, or been removed or replaced within the previous twelve > months. > > A member of the Technical Committee is said to be more senior than > another if they were appointed earlier, or were appointed at the same > time and have been a member of the Debian project longer. In the event > that a member has been appointed more than once, only the most recent > appointment is relevant. > > ? > > It's getting closer to source code than English at that point, but... In fact, I found the above mathematical formulation quite nice, and clearer than the English wording. But it might be just me. Others? > (I'm not sure the second paragraph there is actually needed; could > probably just rely on the secretary or the ctte itself to interpret > "seniority" and disambiguate "appointment" sensibly.) Better safe than sorry, I'd rather keep it in. Even if it were only to spare the Project a couple of threads on "hey, but what does it *actually* mean to be ``more senior''", it would be worth it :-) Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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