I'm going to take this reply out of the bug to just the Policy list, since this really isn't part of the bug discussion and folks trying to understand the bug shouldn't need to read through it. I should have done that with my original message. I'm going to leave the subject line the same so that people who are skipping this thread can keep skipping it.
The arguments in the bug stopped after my last message, which I very much appreciate. However, there is a remaining point here that I believe has to be addressed. After this message, I'll go back and address the substance of the bug report in the bug. Luca Boccassi <bl...@debian.org> writes: > Secondly, and less importantly, while I appreciate it's not how you > handle policy changes, the way the rest of the distribution works is by > 'building consensus' on mailing lists. Now I don't particularly like it, > but it is what it is. And that means if somebody comes up with the most > egregious nonsense like, to pick a completely fictional example, "hey > folks, usr-merge broke docker, rsync and ansible, we need to revert it", > and it is left unchallenged, then it becomes doxa. So it has to be > challenged. Every time. After half a decade, you don't think _that_ is > exhausting? Sam wrote a very nice response to this already, which I also agree with. I'm going to be considerably more blunt, because I want to make sure this is unambiguous and clear. The following is with my Policy Editor hat on and with Sean's agreement as a statement from the Policy Editors. Not only do you not need to repeatedly refute everything you disagree with in Policy discussions, you (and anyone else, for that matter) *may not* argue this way in Policy discussions. If you continue doing that on a bug you opened, we will close that bug and not consider it further unless someone else can present the problem in a constructive way. If that isn't sufficient to stop this escalation spiral, we will look for more drastic measures. Policy work is a delegated position, and the debian-policy list and BTS is where that work happens. This style of argument is a direct impediment to that work. It fills bug discussions with escalating and repetitive arguments that interfere with understanding the underlying problem and writing good policy guidance. The rest of Debian can and does make its own decisions about what styles of argument it wants to allow, but in this corner of Debian that we are responsible for, we're not going to tolerate it. Nearly all of the people who read these discussions are experts with their own considerable knowledge of Debian. They are quite capable of understanding what areas of Debian are contentious, and are not prone to blindly believing statements people make about them. Participants can, and are encouraged to, calmly refute arguments or statements they disagree with, once, after which they should assume that everyone following the discussion can read and remembers what they said. If specific Policy language that seems to be based on erroneous information is proposed for seconds, then by all means bring the refutation up again at that point. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
