On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 04:19:44PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > To make this concrete, we had a spat of GRs to decide various technical > and social issues in Debian some years back, and that practice has died > out almost completely. I know I at least much prefer the current > situation to when lots of contentious decisions involved GRs; [...]
Personally, I would put this down to Debian simply not having any contentious decisions to make. I haven't been following Debian as closely as I once did, though, so perhaps I just haven't seen them. I wonder if anyone can name three "big" controversies over the past few years that have gotten resolved within Debian? To be more specific: something "important" where there's (at least) two different choices that groups of different developers want to make, and some resolution has been arrived at beyond "ignore the whole issue" or "everyone who thinks X has given up/gone away, therefore Y" or "wait and see what other distros do"? A resolution might be winner vs loser (we package stuff in deb, not rpm; we continue with the non-free section of the archive), but it doesn't have to be; sometimes everyone gets convinced that's there's a best way to do things; other times there are technical solution that makes both things possible (alternatives making vim and nvi both work as the default vi, Provides:/Conflicts: for MTAs, packaging both Gnome and KDE). The biggest controversies in free software that I've seen just aren't happening within Debian from what I've seen: Unity vs Gnome3 is an Ubuntu/Gnome thing; upstart vs systemd is an Ubuntu/Fedora thing; funding open source development is a Red Hat/Google/Intel/IBM/HP/Oracle/buxy thing... The biggest controversies I've seen in Debian have been things like "when should dpkg multiarch get uploaded to experimental/unstable" (resolved by a vote though not a GR...), or "what does Constantly Usable Testing actually mean" (afaict resolved by effectively leaving that project on hold so it doesn't have to be answered). But maybe I've just missed a bunch of interesting contentious issues Debian's resolved without a vote over the past few years? Cheers, aj -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120313095108.ga27...@master.debian.org