Re: Status of proposal E (SC change + non-free-firmware in installer)

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org>]

Russ Allbery dijo [Sun, Sep 11, 2022 at 01:38:59PM -0700]:
> Hi all,
> 
> Moving this into a separate thread from all the discussion for a bit more
> visibility.
> 
> Thank you for all the discussion over the past couple of days about my
> proposal and about possible rewordings to point 5 of the Social Contract.
> The short summary is that, after considering that feedback, I'm going to
> stick with the current wording for proposal E for this vote.

Hi Russ,

For those not reading debian-private, I was on [VAC] for slightly over
a week, as I went to a conference in Cyprus, and... well, I was not
able to keep my mind online during said period.

I haven't read the last ~50 messages on debian-vote, so part of what
I'm commenting might already have been discussed.

> I see a clear desire to reword point 5 of the Social Contract to get rid
> of some obsolete language and possibly tighten and clarify it, but I also
> think it's somewhat orthogonal to the current GR.  Therefore, I'm going to
> stick, for this GR, with making what I think is the minimal change
> required to make proposal A clearly consistent with the Social Contract,
> and then will look at starting a separate GR to update SC point 5 based on
> the outcome of that vote.
> (...)

Yes. I completely agree with your rationale here. Particularly the
point about "non-free-firmware installer" and "SC#5
updating/rewording" being almost-orthogonal. And also about the need
for more time than the tail of an ongoing GR for thinking and
discussing foundation-document-altering GRs.

Now, my thinking wandered off to the following timeline:

almost-now    o    Voting is open with the A,B,C,D,E option set.
	      |	   We know the Secretary has warned that some options
	      |    winning might trigger his obligation to mark the
	      |    vote as invalid.
	      |
weeks-from-   o    Vote concludes. Option A wins. The Secretary rules
now	      |	   the vote invalid.
	      |
few-months-   o	   GR for changing SC#5 is called, discussed, voted.
future	      |    There is no longer a SC conflict between
	      |	   2022/vote_003 and SC#5.
	      |

What would follow from here? Would the SC change automatically enable
the Secretary to reinstate the winning option A for 2022/vote_003? Or
are such rulings made (as would make sense!) for the "current
reality"? Would running the same vote again be in place?

Sorry for the hypothesizing, but I think it's important to udnerstand
where we are and where would this lead us to.