[ 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.
