Since I started this thread, I guess I should tie some of it back together...
Matthew Palmer expressed interest in the topic. Certainly, anyone who has useful advice or insights to contribute should feel welcome to do so. And, I certainly wasn't trying to imply that people who read this mailing list are somehow at fault for not contributing enough. Instead, I was trying to point out that IF (and this is a big if), IF many members of Debian as a whole feel that the committee members aren't active enough, then we members should seriously consider stepping down in favor of others who have more energy and are contributing more than us. But my real point is that people aren't exactly trying to break down our door to get in on the exciting work of untangling crossed wires. Thaddeus Black raised the question of whether other people have issues with the people or with the constitution. I'm not the right person to anser that, but I suspect the answer is: a little of each, but mostly neither. Ultimately, our purpose is a sort of "steam release valve" and, for better or worse, we serve that role in more ways than one. Certainly, none of the criticism have been very pointed at committee members or at constitutional issues, though there have been passing references to both. Manoj questions some of the underlying assumptions behind my essay, which is good. Assumptions should be questioned. That said, I'm not going to answers those questions. Bdale and Ian basically seemed to agree with with my points, and Guy emphasized that our role is not to be some kind of replacement for the DPL. I hope I'm not cutting this too short, but I don't have much more to say about these issues. Blars objected, pointing out the tread http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2004/12/msg00000.html and indicating that we didn't solve that problem. It's probably worth noting that that email message (and the responses) don't really identify any technical problem. There are certainly technical issues (one machine has a problem with the volume of uploads), but most of the problem are organizational -- which are outside our scope. We probably should have advised him to contact the ftp site maintainers (I presume they're the right people). But to some degree he was already doing the right things, and we aren't really in any better position than any random maintainers to give answers to the sorts of questions he asked (about what he should and build, sign and upload). Perhaps I'm wrong here -- perhaps administrative issues should be thought of as technical issues -- but if so, I don't really think I should be on this committee. And, if that's the case, I think the constitution should be revised to make this clearer. As it is... presumably we should be more direct when we reject an issue? [In that particular thread, I did write a "why is this a problem" message, but I did not respond directly to Blars, but to a message written by another participant in the thread. In retrospect, I should have asked what he thought the technical problems were.] Hopefully that covers all the major points. I apologise to Blars if our lack of a clear negative response to his message meant he was waiting on us to resolve the ftp administrative issues. Thanks, -- Raul -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
