supermajority requirements and their inheritance (was: Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware)
On Mon, 2022-09-05 at 21:51 +0200, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> You can argue that the developers making the installer and live images,
> and those maintaining the website can make those decisions. You can even
> say that they have made decisions. So those options could be seen as
> overriding a Developer, using the power of the Technical Committee.
>
> Assuming we actually went that way, 6.1.4 requires a 3:1 majority, but
> 4.1.4 only a 2:1 majority. I think we take the highest majority
> requirement in that case, so 3:1.
I think it is bad to transfer supermajority requirements among one
group of voters (tech-ctte) to a very different group of voters (all
DD). Though I agree the constitution is not clear on this.
It might be better to just get rid of both supermajority requirements:
if 50% of all DDs agree on some implementation detail, it's probably
fine to do it that way. I don't see a good reason to require 67% to
agree: that would be the supermajority requirement for constitutional
changes in several countries (e.g., Germany).
The last part makes me think that the 3:1 supermajority requirement is
probably also too high... Because of the low number of voters in tech-
ctte it is practically often even higher than 3:1. So one should
probably also drop or at least lower it for tech-ctte decisions and
maybe lower it to 2:1 for changes to the constitution or foundation
documents, matching real-life constitutional changes.
Ansgar
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