Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Stefano Zacchiroli writes ("Re: Replace the TC power to depose maintainers"):>> We should go for "weak code ownership" instead, which *in theory* is >> what we already have > Well, no. What we have is a kind of sticky door when the current code > owner is cooperative. And many other people have various amounts of > influence. The release team have a certain amount of power. But if the > current code owner is uncooperative, they have almost absolute hard > power. > The TC has never desposed an existing maintainer, and very rarely even > overturned an individual decision. There is a widespread perception that doing this would frequently cause that maintainer to leave Debian. This is quite the mental hurdle to overcome, and the exhortations to not care about this (the subtext of "Debian is better without people who would leave because of that") don't really help. People get their motivations from different sources. It's hard to figure out how to balance this against the demotivating effects of an ongoing bad situation. I know you know all this, but I want to restate it for the record because it affects heavily how I view this proposal. I think we all agree that this is a bad situation to be in, and we should not block other active maintainers because we're afraid that we'll demotivate someone who isn't doing a great job anyway. In other words, I don't think anyone views the above situation as a *feature*. However, it's still psychologically difficult, and I don't think it becomes less difficult by ramping up the confrontationalness of the hardest cases (the ones that come before the TC). The semi-paralysis is largely already because the situation is so fraught, and you're proposing making it even more fraught. I think this is partly what Zack is getting at. If we want to make the situation less fraught, and make changing maintainers or allowing other people to upload packages a less difficult step to make, formalizing this as a remedy in hard cases is less effective as just undermining the concept of maintainership *in general*. This makes all disputes over maintainership somewhat less fraught by making maintainership less of a thing that people feel possessive about, which in turn will make the hard cases easier to handle as well. In other words, I completely agree with you on the problem, but I feel like you're tackling it from the wrong end, since hard cases make bad law. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
