Hi, I was there at the time that the issue was referred to the tech-ctte, and I read all of the posts to that bug at the time, as well as all the parallel discussions taking place on debian-devel.
I can assure you that your interpretation of the first 10 comments is entirely wrong. Tg and paultag are arguing over whether the tech-ctte should rule on whether multiple init systems should be supported. If you read the eventual outcome of the tech-ctte, you will realise that they *did* rule on that, and we *are* supporting multiple inits. So tg's position *actually happened*. > Let me (Steve Litt) paraphrase this: "We've used sysvinit for way too > long, but now, all of a sudden, we just can't wait anymore, and must make > our selection RIGHT NOW, with no further investigation." Nice! This is a completely wrong interpretation. Lucas was advocating for the tech ctte to investigate the issue, which is a LONG way from "let's make a selection right now". "All of a sudden" is a complete fabrication as well, since the issue had been burning for ages, there have been countless discussions about init systems on -devel leading up to this point, even more so than on -user right now. > I'll stop there, but suffice it to say that I've scanned most of it, > and in every case, people with the password and the authority stifled > those who said "wait, there are problems here, let's find different > alternatives" Except, as I point out above, the exact opposite happened to what you claim here, and at no point was any DD prevented from raising a GR if they so wished. Precisely one of thousands did, but it did not attract enough seconds from fellow DDs. You are perhaps not aware of how the tech-ctte works. It's a committee, consisting of a finite set of people, who rule on issues that are *referred to them*: they do not self-select things to discuss. It's one tool in the box to resolve technical disagreements in Debian. GRs are another. The tech-ctte conducts its business entirely in the open, by using a pseudo-package in the BTS, and bugs. That URL is the bug for the tech-ctte discussion. The use of the BTS is to ensure transparency. A side-effect is there is nothing to prevent others from throwing their 2p into the discussion. However that's not the right venue for others to discuss the issue. -devel is, and you can be sure that there were *plenty* of posts there too. (nearly every post to the bug was CCed to -devel anyway). If it seems that tech-ctte members are dismissive of people posting to the bug, be aware that posting to an in-discussion tech-ctte issue is akin to shouting from the public gallery of the House of Commons: it's not the way to get info to the representatives. Please also be aware that there was nothing new raised by anyone in that bug; every issue, every point had been discussed in great depth, many times, on debian-devel leading up to the tech-ctte discussion. > But when I saw the decision making process revealed by this thread, I became > deeply distrustful of the top people in Debian. The tech-ctte exploration was extremely thorough, entirely transparent and I cannot think of any example of a more transparent decision making process in any other Linux community. Not only that, but the entire decision could be overridden by a GR, which *any* developer could raise, at any time (and still can). And the eventual outcome wasn't "there will be one init system", which would be *considerably* easier for the project to manage, but that we support *multiple* init systems! A tremendously more complex task. Red Hat aren't doing that. Fedora aren't doing that. Ubuntu aren't doing that. Crikey, messages like yours as so demotivating. Well-meaning they may be, and innocently misinterpreting the situation they may be, but they suck the life and enthusiasm out of us almost as much as the trolls do. -- Jonathan Dowland -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20141008150137.GA29853@debian