Re: Re: General Resolution: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board result
Sure, if an element of a cycle must be picked then our voting system
does have a way of picking one, unless there's a perfect tie. (And the
details are really interesting if, like me, you're into that sort of
thing.)
But from a Press Release point of view, it would be pretty darn
awkward to say "The Debian Project has voted and chosen OPTION ALPHA.
It is true that a majority of the voters actually preferred OPTION
BETA to OPTION ALPHA. But don't worry about that, because <complicated
technical stuff involving graph theory and seemingly-irrelevant
options gamma and delta>."
That kind of thing is fine for electing a DPL, when presumably
candidates ALPHA and BETA and GAMMA are all reasonable choices, given
that they're in a winning cycle. Plus we don't really need to justify
that decision externally. But for other decisions---and the RMS GR is
a poster boy for this---that logic really doesn't fly, and such a
situation would be quite problematic.
I'm suggesting that, since we came within a razor (just ONE BALLOT, as
Adrian Bunk pointed out) of that situation actually occurring, we get
in front of things, think about it, and figure out something proactive
to prevent it from ever actually happening: to prevent us from ever
having to make such an embarrassing press release.
--Barak A. Pearlmutter
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