Re: What does FD Mean
Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 03:00:45PM +0500, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 12:30:01PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>>> Instead of "attack surface" of a complicated system I would be more
>>> worried about the problem that a part of our electorate does not
>>> understand how to vote in a way that their ballot matches what
>>> they want to express.
>>>
>>> When looking at the tally of the latest systemd vote,[1]
>>> there are plenty of votes like
>>> 1-------
>>>
>>> It is obvious what these voters wanted to express,
>> Which is?
> Option 1 is the only acceptable option.
I agree with Sam: I don't find that obvious at all. Having been in the
middle of that particular discussion for rather too long, I think a vote
of 1------- accurately expresses an opinion that I've seen reasonably
often, namely "personally, I think Debian should just embrace systemd, but
if we're not going to do that, I don't really care what compromise
position we choose and am happy to let people who care more figure that
out."
More generally (and I admit that I'm a bit hypersensitive to this because
I'm from the United States and claiming that voters don't really
understand the ballot has a bit of a history here), I think it's easy to
tie ourselves into knots by assuming that Debian Developers don't
understand our ballots and therefore aren't voting their actual
preferences. At some level this is just a baseline assumption that we
have chosen to make because the other governance systems that don't rely
on that assumption are worse.
We absolutely should make the ballot clearer when we can. We can always
improve, and the less cognitive energy people have to expend on
understanding the mechanics of voting, the better. But we intentionally
chose a voting system that errs on the side of letting people fully
express their opinion rather than being maximally simple, and I think we
generally assume (and should assume) that Debian Developers are a
thoughtful group of people with a reasonably high tolerance for paying
careful attention to detailed instructions and nuance. After all, we ask
for a lot of that in most Debian work.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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