On 2013-03-17 14:50, Moray Allan wrote:
On 2013-03-17 00:13, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
while reviewing the vote that introduced the Debian Maintainer
status
in 2007 (http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003_tally.txt) I
noticed
that Lucas voted in favor and that Moray voted against it.
Moray, why did you vote against?
I'll follow up to explain this soon, but I need to check a couple of
things, in case I'm misremembering details from 2007.
And here's the first part of the full-disclosure answer, on the
historical aspects.
I already had a long-standing interest in how we integrate new
contributors into Debian. See for example this 2005 talk with Hanna
Wallach and Dafydd Harries:
Debian New Maintainer Process: History and Aims. DebConf5, Helsinki,
July 2005.
http://debconf5.debconf.org/comas/general/proposals/39.html
http://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/new_maintainer.pdf
A couple of points from that talk:
"What matters?
- Appropriate outlook: free software
- Sufficient skills"
"NM as a citizenship process
- Clear route to becoming a full member
- NM could focus on bringing people into Debian, rather than keeping
them out
- Building a feeling of responsibility and commitment to the Debian
project as a whole, and to the community"
I'm sure you (Raphaël) can remember some of the arguments on each side
of the GR, since you were rather a major participant in the discussion
https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/threads.html
but I'll give a summary below for others reading this.
I didn't participate in the GR discussion -- note that it happened
during DebConf7 while I was working on local arrangements for the
conference!
Summary:
The point of adding this extra process wasn't clear to everyone
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00062.html
But arguments used in favour included:
The NM process sets too high a barrier for people who want to maintain
one package
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00054.html
Getting sponsors is annoying
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00063.html
Not everyone wants full DD status
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00050.html
or https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00105.html
This was a good way to work around problems with the NM process or
account creation
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00091.html
though others in the "for" camp claimed this wasn't right
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00046.html
Arguments against included:
This was creating second-class DDs
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00043.html
or https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00067.html
Adding a new status was overcomplicating things
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00043.html
This was just an attempt to work around perceived problems with the NM
process or account creation
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00043.html
If we wanted to change things, we should just change the NM process
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00058.html
If people don't want full DD rights, they're free just not to use them
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00111.html
If people genuinely don't want to be associated with us, they shouldn't
be part of the project at all
e.g. https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/06/msg00090.html
If you want to go back further, there was a previous discussion
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/03/msg00074.html
at that point things were still vague, without a detailed proposal, and
therefore the issues were a bit different though.
For my actual vote, if I recall correctly:
- I just wasn't persuaded that adding another status, rather than
modifying something about the NM process, made sense.
- I didn't see the sense in allowing people to upload freely (even for
single packages), but not making them eligible for membership
privileges.
- The people proposing the GR saw it as widening access. Due to the
above two points, for me, it seemed like narrowing it. I could
understand reasons for initially putting *technical* restrictions on new
contributors, but if we reached the point of fully trusting someone with
a package (and therefore root privileges on every machine where it's
installed), and giving them a formal status in Debian, I felt that we
should already recognise them as members. Though the GR proposers said
that it was for people who would not have otherwise have had any status
at all, I was worried that the effect was to shut some formally
recognised contributors out of membership.
Therefore I was part of the about 38% of people who voted against the
GR, see
curl -s http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003_tally.txt | grep -v
"^....1"
--
Moray
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130317204251.ga8...@sermisy.org
