There are often topics about where it would be useful to have a statement of position, or some recommendations for project participants (or for users or citizens). I'm speaking here primarily of nontechnical matters.
Often these are in the remit of individual maintainers or maintainership teams. So for example, the boundaries of what counts as a release-critical bug, or decisions about licence acceptability. But there are also topics which aren't covered by an existing team or delegation. There are a couple of these that are on the DPL's plate right now: - Dealing with "inbound" trademarks. Ie, how best to deal with possible trademark risks in the software we deal with; - A requests from Debian as a whole to its downstreams including particularly a specific request to eg Ubuntu; Up to this point in the project we have normally published only: - GRs - Formal policy documents issued by teams (of which the Dev Ref is an example); - Press releases - Informal statements by individuals I think it would be useful to add a new category to this list: - Formal policy document from the DPL Of course like any other DPL decision these would be published by the DPL after discussion and consensus-seeking. And if the matter turns out to be too controversial, or the DPL wants to make sure the document has a good mandate, the GR process is available (either via the route of a DPL-initiated GR, or an overruling GR). But I think on many topics it ought to be possible to get consensus within the project on a position which clearly reflects the views of most of the DDs. (And implicitly where those who disagree with the DPL's statement can feel that their views have been taken into account but can also see that ultimately those views are not widely shared.) Do we think it would be proper, for example, to write up as a DPL-issued document the best practice for dealing with inbound trademarks ? The alternative for this issue would seem to be to run it as a GR. I think that's too heavyweight a process; we should be using it where important matters of principle are at stake, or where we haven't been able to see where consensus lies or indeed get a good enough rough consensus on a particular approach. Another example of a possible document of this kind would have been the diversity statement. I think it would have been proper, if there had been enough agreement, for the DPL to issue that statement themselves. But as it turned out, the level of consensus wasn't sufficient particularly given that the diversity statement needed a solid mandate - so a GR was required. Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20622.48956.195581.813...@chiark.greenend.org.uk