On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 01:32:40PM +0100, Johannes Schauer wrote: > Quoting Ian Jackson (2016-12-02 12:43:52) > > Otherwise it really will be chaos, with people uploading contra-reverts of > > each others' reverts. > > Personally, I doubt that this would happen. In a world without maintainership, > I'd expect anybody doing an upload to do it with the best interest of the > distribution as a whole at heart. If the content of the upload goes against > what other people had in mind, then I'd expect them to discuss and find a > solution. I would not expect the result to be multiple counter-reverting > uploads from the involved parties. That'd just be rude.
So, let's make an experiment: declare the piece of d-i that decides what init system to install free-for-all to change. Assuming everyone does so only with a honest belief it's for the good of the distribution and users. Or, let's take a look at some projects that allow everyone to make a change. Like, Wikipedia. Let's disregard trolls and vandals, and look only at editors who seem to truly believe what edits are for the better. Multiple counter-reverting is a rule rather than an exception. Or, a personal account: I used to be deeply involved in Crawl's upstream: just a game but I've put way too much effort there. It has a decent-sized active devteam, 10+ commits per day -- yet most months around 40% were mine. All devs with push rights are equal (there's also a number of contributors who send patches to official devs). Enter a dev who only quite recently got push access. One day, he merged a pile of commits that added a bunch of features with quite poor design and abysmal code quality, without putting that into a branch first or discussing on usual dev channels (he merely mentioned it on an equivalent of debian-user which few devs read). That merge also deleted and superseded a large project I had actively worked on at the time. What could I do? My options were to put my weight and mass-revert the whole push (with big save compat issues, especially as another unrelated (proper) big merge also happened hours later), or avoid the conflict by quitting. I did the latter. But, quitting coding a game that you can do without is a lot easier than quitting something you use extensively. Thus, sorry, but a cooperative free-for-all project with everyone being equal just doesn't work past a minimal scale. You need either a separation of rights or some sort of management. Meow! -- The bill declaring Jesus as the King of Poland fails to specify whether the addition is at the top or end of the list of kings. What should the historians do?
