Juliusz Chroboczek writes:

 > >> - What is the process for overthrowing representatives?
 > >>   Example: Eric goes insane and decides that Darcs should be
 > >>   rewritten in Emacs Lisp,
 > 
 > Now, now.  Please choose TECO, SNOBOL, or C++ next time.

I know what's wrong with Emacs Lisp ;-) but what's wrong with SNOBOL?

 > >>   (This process might just be "well, fork it".)
 > 
 > Note that most successful changes in leadership were done by
 > forking (X.Org, EGCS).  I don't think there's such a thing as a
 > graceful overthrow mechanism.

XEmacs has done it several times since the fork from Emacs.  We've
since had two forks I can remember.  One (UTF-2000) was very graceful;
the forker decided he didn't care if his code segfaulted occasionally
since it was used mostly by his (linguistic) research colleagues.  The
other was also reasonably graceful though preceded by some fireworks,
but it was inevitable (the sticking point was removing all traces of
Windows code from XEmacs, which the forker knew we weren't going to do).

On the other hand, on several occasions we've had maintainers who got
a life (a wife, a kid, drinking problems, whatever) and went AWOL.
The maintainers in question weren't particularly graceful about
stepping down, but the project recovered smoothly.  I don't think
there was much to be done for the maintainers (and I know the
maintainer side from experience since I've been neglecting things I
really should do for XEmacs for about a year now, but unfortunately
there's nobody interested in deposing me at the moment ;-).

 > I would personally be opposed to codyfing such a mechanism.  If the
 > leadership is overthrown,

Note that we're not necessarily talking about overthrowing the
leadership.  The oversight committee's role is currently limited to
changing the representative of the project to the Conservacy.  It
could very well be that the leadership is overthrowing its servant.

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