Wouter Verhelst writes ("Re: Next Meeting: Wednesday, May 16th 19:00 UTC (today) - Currently no topics"): > On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 08:59:35PM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote: > > As David mentioned in IRC and I mentioned in person to the people in > > Hamburg, it is a bit worrying to not have anything to discuss, > > Why is it worrying? > > The TC not having things to discuss means everyone in Debian is getting > along nicely. That's great! :-) > > (well, okay, that's the theory)
Sadly I think it is more likely that people in Debian have given up trying to use the TC to resolve any differences of opinion they may have. debian-devel has become the most obvious escalation route. (Along with attempts to resolve disputes in one side or the other's favour through chnages to policy and/or lintian.) And, indeed, recently no-one there diagreed when I wrote this in a thread about autopkgtest regressions blocking testing migration: > a regression in a reverse dependency can come due to one of the > following reasons (of course not complete): ... I think you need more information about process and authority, and what to do if the maintainers disagree, or if one or the other does not respond. We don't have a good formal mechanism for resolving disagreements, and our NMU rules are restrictive and opaque, so this is not so easy. And later in the same mail I therefore proposed this wording, which was adopted: If you find that you are not able to agree between you about the right next steps, bug severities, etc., please try to find a neutral third party to help you mediate and/or provide a third opinion. Failing that your best bet is probably to post to debian-devel. Of course in cases of serious disagreement, using a mailing list turns into a war of attrition. Luckily most of our contributors have spotted this failure mode and avoided it. Instead, when the maintainers of a package, or a core team, dig their heels in about something we care about, and block our work or break things we are relying on, we shrug our shoulders and go and do something else with our life. Perhaps something not related to Debian. I think that a substantial proportion of the project even think that this is how things should work. But it does not mean that everyone is happy. Regretfully, Ian.