* Sean Whitton <spwhit...@spwhitton.name> [2019-11-29 17:52]: > I would be grateful for an informal summary of why proposal F is > thought to be needed on the ballot in addition to proposal C. What > is thought not captured well by Sam's text, but is thought to be > captured well by Martin's text?
I'm sorry for the delay. Maybe this reply is moot now that proposal C has been withdrawn but I wanted to share my personal view of why another proposal was needed. When I read through the proposals, there was a lot about proposal B that I liked. It contains a lot of "common sense" stuff like: we want to explore and experiment; people interested in something should do the work; maintainers should review patches. All of that are Debian values that I agree with. And proposal B says that systemd is the main system. So there's a lot about proposal B that I like, but at the end of the day the proposal doesn't sound that different to the status quo. While it says systemd, there's no 100% commitment (there's no clear preference over Debian kludges for example, unlike proposal C had); and while it talks about experimenting, there's no 100% commitment to supporting other systems. So, in a way, it seems like perpetuating the current situation, which hasn't been working. It just seems to lack some finality. (And some people will disagree that it would be similar to the current situation, otherwise Sam wouldn't have proposed it in the first place.) (I have similar feelings about Ian's proposal D, btw. Again, it contains a lot of stuff in the beginning that most people in Debian agree with, but then goes into details that I'm not so sure about.) Okay, so then I read proposal C. And while I believe proposal C is what a lot of people want (i.e. focus on systemd, integrate it more and basically move on), I find the proposal extremely... bland. Like I said, proposals B and D have a lot of values that you can agree with. Proposal C doesn't have any what I originally described as "passion". When talking to other people I realized that proposal C lacks "vision". Proposals B/D have much more of that passion/values/vision. So looking at the proposals, I just found the offering a bit skewed because I felt that the proposal that a lot of people want has no "sway" in comparison with some of the other proposals. I originally wrote a really bad proposal but after talking to some people developed a better understanding of what I was missing in the current proposals and got good ideas on how to frame things (the cross-distro aspect wasn't my idea). I hope that explains it. -- Martin Michlmayr https://www.cyrius.com/