On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 02:41:50PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > No, perhaps you are right. But asking for a reasonable time to > implement the changes in the social contract does not requires > rescinding and restoring the social contract amendments; it could > just be a statement of purpose, a working guide to the change, > perhaps with a hard deadline. The foundation document stays > unchanged.
Because this sort of concept affects the interpretation of the foundation documents, I think the implementation should be handled as a change (presumably, as an addition) to the foundation documents. But it probably is a good idea to characterize: [1] What we think is most important to accomplish, [2] How we think that should be accomplished before getting into the specifics of the language which implements these ideas. Personally, I think [1] is already largely answered in the social contract. (Our priorities are...). The problem is that in any given context one priority must take precendence over the other or we have a dilemma. Unfortunately, to date, more energy has been more focussed on generalizing these concepts than on deciding which is more relevant to specific contexts. Which leaves us with plenty of dilemmas, and not so much energy for resolving them. In my opinion, the needs of the free software community take precedence in the context of adopting new packages, in the setting of release goals, in our choices about infrastructure and philosophy, and of course in the context of any development work we do. In my opinion, the needs of our users take precedence in the context of security fixes, in the context of support for packages and systems we've released, and in the context of the quality of our work. Moreover, any context where these two needs come in conflict should be treated as a very serious issue. Where these two needs come in conflict we have to choose between several bad (or at least not good) choices while avoiding even worse choices. And, judging by the amount of heat which has gone into these discussions, I think that other people have similar (though presumably not identical) views. Anyways, I do think that the choices we make to resolve the current heated issue deserve the same class of treatment as our foundation documents, if only for some limited time (perhaps until the current problematic packages have "suitable replacements", perhaps "until the next major release or the nth point release where n = 6", perhaps some other criteria). -- Raul
