Dear all, during today's face-to-face meeting at DebConf (with Steve, Andreas, Bdale and myself), we reviewed all currently open issues [0] and discussed informally how we felt about what the next steps should be for each of them, and spread action items between us. Expect moves on various bugs "soon".
We also discussed the actual "TC proposing GRs" issue. For the context, during the initial #636783 discussions, Ian proposed various options to facilitate the acceptance of uncontroversial amendments by the TC, in the context of GRs proposed by the TC. His initial idea, was to let the TC delegate this power to one of its members, but this was considered unconstitutional by the secretary. He then came up with the following "promise" that was supposed to come after each GR proposals, it is attached to this mail. During the discussion, we understood this as an attempt at reaching the same effect than the delegation to an individual TC member, only delegating to all of them, through using unusual constitutional gymnastics, with which we didn't really feel comfortable. The crux of the issue is really that the §4.2.1 procedure allowing the TC to automatically trigger GRs is hardly practical for the next parts of the GR procedure (amendments, etc), given §A.1 "discussion and amendments". But the discussion revealed a quite easy way out of this, that doesn't require the complicated "TC promise mechanism": §4.2.1 : "A resolution or amendment is introduced if proposed by any Developer and sponsored by at least K other Developers". Given that K is maximum 5 (and will stay 5 as long as there are more than 100 Developers), this means that an GR proposal uncontroversial within the TC can easily be introduced if 6 TC members agree with it (one proposer, 5 sponsors). We therefore concluded that this would be a good way to move forward on these issues: any TC member should propose these and the others (feeling so) would sponsor the GR. The process would then follow as usual. Given how much clearer this process looks like, I'll act boldly and reformat the GR proposals in the repository accordingly. Cheers, OdyX
2. It is not practical for the TC to vote to accept/reject individual amendments to the GR proposal. The TC would wish to delegate its power to accept amendments, to avoid needing the collection of sponsors for uncontroversial changes. However the Secretary has advised that this is not constitutionally acceptable. Therefore, to achieve roughly the same effect, the TC makes the following promise. If any TC member gives notice that the TC accepts an amendment, then at least one of the following will happen: (a) the TC will use its own power under A.1(1) to arrange that the amendment appears on the GR ballot as an option; (b) the TC will use its power under A.1(1) to propose and its power under A.1(2) to accept the amendment, so that the amendment is incorporated in the version voted on; or (c) A member of the TC will publicly notify the amendment's proposer that the amendment will not be accepted after all. In this case TC will wait at least 7 more days before calling for a vote, to give time for the amendment's proposer to collect sponsors. ===== TC RESOLUTION ENDS =====