On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 02:55:19PM +0200, Thomas Viehmann wrote: > and offering an apology acceptable to the release team. Debian has, in my > opinion, the obligation towards the people doing one of the hardest tasks > Debian has to offer (look at the number of people it has worn out) to not > tolerate that accusation. If there needs to be a discussion whether the > release team was working outside the scope of its authority here, so be > it, but the being depicted as betraying Debian's goals is beyond what the > release team can be expected to endure.
In my opinion, however, you have this backwards. The release team members (and this goes for any other core team as well) have privileges which are withheld from the other developers for whatever reason, and they have been granted such privileges presumably to serve the project, not as some kind of reward or recognition for merit or industrious service or brownnosing. I imagine that these people have either explicitly pursued this power or that it has been offered to them and they have explicitly accepted. Such conscious and willful acts should have been coupled with conscious and willful acceptance that with this power comes great responsibility. This responsibility is not as a parent or caretaker for misbehaving ingrates, but to serve every single DD who lacks those powers. The feelings of the privileged people should be secondary to the feelings of the unprivileged people. Their actions should be extremely transparent and subject to review. This includes not having secret back-room discussions about project business. Now if you were suggesting that we should all be civil to one another, I would have a different argument, but what I infer from your words is that we owe the release team more because of the work that they do. The inverse is true: the release team owes us more because they CAN do the work. In my mind I can't conceive of why they would have willingly accepted power if they weren't prepared to face the highest scrutiny and criticisms. Can you? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]