Adrian Bunk <b...@debian.org> writes: > The ftp team has repeatedly stated that it is working as a team and > that decisions are not arbitrary decisions by individual team members.
> This implies that for tasks like NEW handling there exist guidelines > in some form, that might need some polishing before publication. People often assume there's some sort of "real" documentation for what is and isn't acceptable, but it's being kept secret from the rest of the project, and point to the above as a justification for that belief. However, I think it's worth realizing this isn't necessarily true. A group can share a consensus opinion without having written documentation in the case where training is via mentorship and apprenticeship rather than through written instruction. And I believe that's exactly the case for FTP master. The team arrives at the same practices because they are taught the same practices through apprenticeship, IRC discussions, and corrected practice, not because there's some secret reference manual. So yes, in some sense there are some guidelines, but they could well be entirely unwritten tribal knowledge that has been communicated through innumerable fragmentary IRC conversations and in-person chats. Which means that turning them into something that can be given to the rest of the project as reference is still extremely difficult. Unfortunately, due to the nature of this ongoing discussion, there's also now a ton of *pressure* around the first release of that document. It would be met with a ton of scrutiny and discussion, which makes it even harder to be the one to put oneself on the line and try to write down unwritten tribal knowledge, possibly incorrectly or incompletely. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>