Package: tech-ctte Severity: normal Tags: a11y X-Debbugs-Cc: debbug.tech-c...@sideload.33mail.com
# The DSC needs to become meaningful Chuck Zmudzinski filed a bug report saying that the Debian Social Contract (DSC) is “meaningless”: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1028557 He is correct in the sense that there is no enforcement mechanism. At the same time, the Debian Constitution (DC) also neglects to acknowledge jurisdiction over DSC enforcement. This is a bug. I think it’s assumed that the technical committee is tasked with DSC enforcement. But this should be explicit and without guesswork. Is the DSC a guaranteed protection whereby non-compliances have a complaint mechanism and corrective procedure? Or is the DSC actually intended to be comparable to a meaningless pushover license? # Transparency In a sense, the transparency problem is joined with a dog food problem. Consider ¶3: > “3. We will not hide problems > > We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at > all times. Reports that people file online will promptly become > visible to others.” (off-topic bug: “others” should be changed to “the public”, but security bugs should be exempt from “promptly”) Problems in the DSC and calls for improvement thereof should itself be a transparent process. It was unclear to me where to submit this bug herein: tech-ctte, qa.debian.org, or general? The DSC shows “Version 1.2 ratified on October 1st, 2022.” But where and how? The public should have transparent access to the discussions, decisions, and changes. # DSC change proposal: make documentation accessible to ALL people There is a growing problem of documentation being locked into walled gardens which discriminate against several demographics of people, such as blind people being forced to solve a CAPTCHA that requires vision. The access-restricted documentation problem is particularly rampant on the Linux Mint and (ironically) Ubuntu projects. Debian does not proactively impose any walled gardens on people at the moment but whenever a package makes reference to external documentation served from an access-restricted location, Debian passively allows this. Debian can (and should) do better than this. The problem and proposal is described in detail here: * https://linux.community/post/649372 * https://kbin.social/m/debian/t/889598/Debian-Social-Contract-Should-all-Debian-users-inclusively-have-open Those two links ↑ give two different views of the same article. I reference both because of a minor formatting bug in kbin.
