Bug#1066034: tech-ctte: proposed constitution fix and social contract chg to make documentation accessible to all people

2024-03-11 Thread gregor herrmann
On Mon, 11 Mar 2024 14:37:45 +0100, debbug.tech-c...@sideload.33mail.com wrote:

> The DSC shows “Version 1.2 ratified on October 1st, 2022.” But where
> and how?  The public should have transparent access to the
> discussions, decisions, and changes.

The last change of the DSC happened via a General Resolution, as laid
out by the Constitution, where the voting period ended on 2022-10-01.

Discussion and vote procedure/outcome are publically available:

https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003

https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2022/08/ ff.
 

gregor

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Bug#1066034: tech-ctte: proposed constitution fix and social contract chg to make documentation accessible to all people

2024-03-11 Thread Gunnar Wolf
[ I am not part of the Technical Committee anymore, am answering just
  as a DD ]

debbug.tech-c...@sideload.33mail.com dijo [Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 02:37:45PM 
+0100]:
> # The DSC needs to become meaningful
> 
> Chuck Zmudzinski filed a bug report saying that the Debian Social
> Contract (DSC) is “meaningless”:
> 
>   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1028557
> 
> He is correct in the sense that there is no enforcement mechanism. At
> the same time, the Debian Constitution (DC) also neglects to
> acknowledge jurisdiction over DSC enforcement. This is a bug. I think
> it’s assumed that the technical committee is tasked with DSC
> enforcement. But this should be explicit and without guesswork.
> 
> Is the DSC a guaranteed protection whereby non-compliances have a
> complaint mechanism and corrective procedure?  Or is the DSC actually
> intended to be comparable to a meaningless pushover license?

No, the TC does not go around with a stick chasing violators of the
Social Contract. The SC is upheld by each individual Debian
contributor. Particularly, the Debian Developers have signed a
statement to follow this document when volunteering work for the
project. It is up to us all, as a group, to uphold it.

> (...)
> Problems in the DSC and calls for improvement thereof should itself be
> a transparent process. It was unclear to me where to submit this bug
> herein: tech-ctte, qa.debian.org, or general?

If you need to discuss this kind of documents, the right venue would
be the debian-proj...@lists.debian.org list. However, please modulate
a bit your tone, as this message feels to fall a bit towards
aggressive writing; you will find better echo if you approach trying
to understand instead of demanding action.

> The DSC shows “Version 1.2 ratified on October 1st, 2022.” But where
> and how?  The public should have transparent access to the
> discussions, decisions, and changes.

Debian is not a government, but a volunteer project. "The public" has
no rights: We have a committment to which we all (Developers) adhere
to. "We will not hide problems", of course, but if you want something
to change, please try pointing at specific issues that were not
handled correctly --- and for which the incorrect handling was done
purposefully so (i.e. hiding problems); we have more than once found
that we are stuck in a loophole we are unable to properly fix, and
cannot enforce our golden standard (i.e. the declassification of the
debian-private mailing list, that was supposed to happen for ~10
years, until we decided via an open discussion and vote that it just
was not be possible to do correctly.

> # DSC change proposal: make documentation accessible to ALL people
> 
> There is a growing problem of documentation being locked into walled
> gardens which discriminate against several demographics of people,
> such as blind people being forced to solve a CAPTCHA that requires
> vision. The access-restricted documentation problem is particularly
> rampant on the Linux Mint and (ironically) Ubuntu projects. Debian
> does not proactively impose any walled gardens on people at the moment
> but whenever a package makes reference to external documentation
> served from an access-restricted location, Debian passively allows
> this. Debian can (and should) do better than this. The problem and
> proposal is described in detail here:
> 
>   * https://linux.community/post/649372
>   * 
> https://kbin.social/m/debian/t/889598/Debian-Social-Contract-Should-all-Debian-users-inclusively-have-open
> 
> Those two links ↑ give two different views of the same article. I
> reference both because of a minor formatting bug in kbin.

The point you raise is interesting and worth discussing, although I
believe it would place too much of a burden on maintainers. But I feel
it is orthogonal to the main issue discussed.

Besides that, I completely agree with Christoph, in order for a
discussion to be taken seriously, I strongly recommend you to disclose
your name and a real address, and not do it from an unknown,
mission-specific sender.



Bug#1066034: tech-ctte: proposed constitution fix and social contract chg to make documentation accessible to all people

2024-03-11 Thread Christoph Berg
Re: debbug.tech-c...@sideload.33mail.com
> # The DSC needs to become meaningful
> 
> Chuck Zmudzinski filed a bug report saying that the Debian Social
> Contract (DSC) is “meaningless”:

Hi,

I don't think the tech-ctte is the right body to address this.

Also, please file request using a name, we'd want to know who we
are talking to.

Christoph



Bug#1066034: tech-ctte: proposed constitution fix and social contract chg to make documentation accessible to all people

2024-03-11 Thread debbug . tech-ctte
Package: tech-ctte
Severity: normal
Tags: a11y
X-Debbugs-Cc: debbug.tech-c...@sideload.33mail.com

# The DSC needs to become meaningful

Chuck Zmudzinski filed a bug report saying that the Debian Social
Contract (DSC) is “meaningless”:

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1028557

He is correct in the sense that there is no enforcement mechanism. At
the same time, the Debian Constitution (DC) also neglects to
acknowledge jurisdiction over DSC enforcement. This is a bug. I think
it’s assumed that the technical committee is tasked with DSC
enforcement. But this should be explicit and without guesswork.

Is the DSC a guaranteed protection whereby non-compliances have a
complaint mechanism and corrective procedure?  Or is the DSC actually
intended to be comparable to a meaningless pushover license?

# Transparency

In a sense, the transparency problem is joined with a dog food
problem. Consider ¶3:

> “3. We will not hide problems
> 
> We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at
> all times. Reports that people file online will promptly become
> visible to others.”

(off-topic bug: “others” should be changed to “the public”,
 but security bugs should be exempt from “promptly”)

Problems in the DSC and calls for improvement thereof should itself be
a transparent process. It was unclear to me where to submit this bug
herein: tech-ctte, qa.debian.org, or general?

The DSC shows “Version 1.2 ratified on October 1st, 2022.” But where
and how?  The public should have transparent access to the
discussions, decisions, and changes.

# DSC change proposal: make documentation accessible to ALL people

There is a growing problem of documentation being locked into walled
gardens which discriminate against several demographics of people,
such as blind people being forced to solve a CAPTCHA that requires
vision. The access-restricted documentation problem is particularly
rampant on the Linux Mint and (ironically) Ubuntu projects. Debian
does not proactively impose any walled gardens on people at the moment
but whenever a package makes reference to external documentation
served from an access-restricted location, Debian passively allows
this. Debian can (and should) do better than this. The problem and
proposal is described in detail here:

  * https://linux.community/post/649372
  * 
https://kbin.social/m/debian/t/889598/Debian-Social-Contract-Should-all-Debian-users-inclusively-have-open

Those two links ↑ give two different views of the same article. I
reference both because of a minor formatting bug in kbin.