On Sat May 02 07:10, Russ Allbery wrote: > To recap, the counter-argument is that such a *non-binding* position > statement is obviously nonsensical and hence people aren't going to > follow it even if it passes, which it won't because it's non-sensical. > In other words, you're making a reductio ad absurdum argument in a place > where there are other controls. If a majority of people in Debian voted > for a non-binding position statement that so obviously, clearly, and > directly contradicts a foundation document, we have considerably more > problems than the question of a supermajority.
Sorry if it looks like I was ignoring that Russ, I wasn't (and I presented, I hope, your view in one of the options on my proposed ballot). I was trying to demonstrate that there are things which are in conflict with a foundation document and that something needs to be done about vote options which are such conflicts but don't explicitly amend that document. The solution could be as you say that they are therefore non-binding (although I don't see that is is a _useful_ solution, see Don and Manoj's posts to this thread, it's at least _consistent). It could be that they need 3:1 to pass whether they are explicit modifications to the document or not (which is what I always thought was the case), or it could be that they are binding even without a super majority (and it's this view I was trying to address here. All of these are consistent views held by several of the contributors to the various threads, and all of them consider that to be what the status quo is. I wish to clarify it one way or another > If you think there's any serious danger of that passing with a majority, > I would contend that you're essentially arguing there's such a serious > disagreement in Debian over this issue that we do not even share the > same language, terms, and basis for discussion. I don't see that > pessimism supported by any of the previous votes or by the general > discussion here. No, I wouldn't expect that vote to pass, however, the point of the example was to demonstrate that it definitely contradicts the DFSG. There are arguments that kernel firmware doesn't, that's fine, but it wasn't the point I was making, so I wanted an example which was clear. All I was trying to demonstrate was to provide an example of a vote which is clearly contradictory to a foundation document, but did not modify it. Votes in practice will be closer to the line, of course. Matt -- Matthew Johnson
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