Miles Fidelman <mfidel...@meetinghouse.net> writes: > Well, first off, the process led to the resignation of the chair of the > Technical Committee - out of a feeling that the process had become too > "personalized."
Some decisions are just hard. I think nearly all of us involved in making that decision burned out in various ways. I'm not saying we couldn't have done a better job... well, hm. Actually, I am kind of saying that, if by "couldn't" I include the people that we were at the time with the emotional reserves that we had and the understanding that we had. I could certainly do a better job *now* if I could rewind time, but that's cheating, and humans don't get to do that. I'm with Steve in that I'm pretty dubious that the process was the core of why that decision was so hard. I think it was so hard because it spanned the gamut from technical to social issues, involved some issues that were relatively concrete and others that were quite nebulous (such as the interactions between the goals of the systemd developers and the broader community), and also involved deep social divisions in the project between folks who want Debian to be a platform for all things and folks who want Debian to be more tightly integrated and more technically excellent along a single axis. This stuff is inherently very hard, particularly when friends end up on opposite sides and believe passionately in how important their concerns are. I think we sometimes analyze process to death and refight the last fourteen wars and dig up problems to argue about them some more. We're human, this stuff is hard, some things are going to be brutal to get through when we disagree, and it's okay to forgive ourselves for not being perfect. Or even being pretty shitty at it. That's not to say that we shouldn't look for opportunities to fix things that we can. For example, we certainly uncovered some nasty edge cases in the voting mechanism for the TC, which are now fixed. And many of us felt that people serving for extended periods of time on the TC wasn't socially healthy for either us or the project, so we fixed that too. But I think there's a idealistic, utopian tendency among a lot of technical people, myself included, to believe that any serious conflict or (from our perspective) incorrect decision is a bug in a process somewhere, and if we can just find the right process, we can fix the bugs. And it's just not true. Humans are messy and humans disagree, and sometimes stuff is just really hard, and is going to be really hard no matter how you do it. > Beyond that, there are a rather large number of folks, impacted by the > decision, who did not have a seat at the table. Those of us who rely on > Debian in production, for example. Upstream developers for another. > Some of us knew about the issues & debates, without having a > "franchise," others found out after the fact. Seems to me that lack of > representation is, in itself, a rather big failure of governance. Debian is *more* willing to try to take into account the needs of its users than most free software projects, but Debian is still a volunteer free software project, and the rule of just about every volunteer, unfunded free software project is that the people who are doing the work are the ones who are going to make the decisions. Think of it this way: the people who are sufficiently invested in the project to spend our time and energy on it over a long enough period of time to become members are deeply invested in it and want to control where it goes. Plus, we're all volunteers and don't have to work on anything we don't want to work on, which means maintaining our engagement is absolutely necessary for the project to survive. I understand your desire to have a say in something that's important to you, but, well, if it's that important to you, the New Maintainer process is right over there? We always need more help. Absent that, the people who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into the project are the people who are going to make the decisions, of course with an eye to our project agreement to try to prioritize our users. But it's going to be our interpretation of what's good for our users. If people who weren't doing the work, who weren't part of that community and taking part of the load, were calling the shots and the rest of us had to obey them, well... we have a word for that. It's called a job, and the entire relationship with the work is different, and I would expect to be paid. If it helps, think of having a voice in the decisions to be the pay that we get for working on Debian. > It might, however, have led to the Technical Committee giving more > weight to the impacts of the decisions. I always have to laugh at statements like that, since I think they come from a well-meaning place of almost total lack of understanding of what it was like to be on the TC during that decision. I think I put more thought into all of the aspects of that decision, including weight on the impacts of the decisions, than just about any other decision I've made in my life. I have put less thought into where I live than into systemd. I think this is part of that all-too-human belief that one's own position is so obviously correct that if anyone disagrees with you, it's just because they've not thought about the problem hard enough. And it's just not true. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>