Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Eli Schwartz via aur-general]

On 01/24/2018 11:18 AM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> On 01/23/2018 12:54 PM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>> On 01/18/2018 06:18 PM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>>> Not everything that is available only to an aurweb account of the
>>> Trusted User type, qualifies as a TU "privilege"
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Eli Schwartz 
>>> ---
>>>
>>> Handy link to context and surrounding discussion:
>>>
>>> https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-January/033789.html
>>>
>>> The current wording of the bylaws indicates that there are two ways for
>>> a TU to qualify for special removal due to inactivity:
>>>
>>> 1) Do not participate in voting, thereby potentially blockading a quorum.
>>>
>>> 2) Do not participate in general TU'ish activities like maintaining
>>>[community], administrating the AUR and the packagers and users therein,
>>>being representative of TUs in general on this mailing list by being
>>>awesome and stuff, i.e. posting (hopefully useful information that helps
>>>AUR users), and... um... voting?
>>>
>>> Point #2 calls out "performed any action that required TU privileges on
>>> the AUR", but does the tu voting interface on aurweb count as that or
>>> not? Moreover, do we *want* it to count? It seems to be somewhat
>>> defeating the purpose of the process, i.e. as long as a TU doesn't
>>> actually block quorum during a vote, they can remain while not actually
>>> performing any of the inherent functions of a TU.
>>>
>>> Now, I would argue that under a common sense interpretation the original
>>> intent of the bylaws was almost certainly that voting does not count as
>>> a "TU privilege", since a TU is someone who has the "privilege" to
>>> administrate AUR packages and users in order to keep good order, and
>>> select good packages to upload to [community]. 
>>>
>>> But bylaws exist in order to prevent people from having different
>>> interpretations of common sense. So this should be clarified no matter
>>> what.
>>
>> Thus far, we've (I think) only seen people argue that:
>>
>> 1) this is what the bylaws really mean, let us clarify it for the sake
>> of less confusion some other day,
>>
>> 2) The bylaws do not mean this and should not do this.
>>
>>
>> Can I assume that means there is no one who feels this *should* be true,
>> but currently *isn't*?
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Does anyone have any last-minute proposals to modify the wording for
>> grammar etc. in the event that this is accepted?
> 
> The discussion period is over, time to vote!
> 
> https://aur.archlinux.org/tu/?id=102

The results are in!

Yes No Abstain Total Voted Participation
26  9  4   39Yes   81.25%


Seems like overall people thought this was a reasonable interpretation.

Rather than holding *another* round of votes to decide whether the
previous voting results (for #100 and #101) should be upheld two weeks
later, I think it is safe to declare that the previous proposals were
indeed valid.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User



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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Eli Schwartz via aur-general]

On 01/23/2018 12:54 PM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> On 01/18/2018 06:18 PM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>> Not everything that is available only to an aurweb account of the
>> Trusted User type, qualifies as a TU "privilege"
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Eli Schwartz 
>> ---
>>
>> Handy link to context and surrounding discussion:
>>
>> https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-January/033789.html
>>
>> The current wording of the bylaws indicates that there are two ways for
>> a TU to qualify for special removal due to inactivity:
>>
>> 1) Do not participate in voting, thereby potentially blockading a quorum.
>>
>> 2) Do not participate in general TU'ish activities like maintaining
>>[community], administrating the AUR and the packagers and users therein,
>>being representative of TUs in general on this mailing list by being
>>awesome and stuff, i.e. posting (hopefully useful information that helps
>>AUR users), and... um... voting?
>>
>> Point #2 calls out "performed any action that required TU privileges on
>> the AUR", but does the tu voting interface on aurweb count as that or
>> not? Moreover, do we *want* it to count? It seems to be somewhat
>> defeating the purpose of the process, i.e. as long as a TU doesn't
>> actually block quorum during a vote, they can remain while not actually
>> performing any of the inherent functions of a TU.
>>
>> Now, I would argue that under a common sense interpretation the original
>> intent of the bylaws was almost certainly that voting does not count as
>> a "TU privilege", since a TU is someone who has the "privilege" to
>> administrate AUR packages and users in order to keep good order, and
>> select good packages to upload to [community]. 
>>
>> But bylaws exist in order to prevent people from having different
>> interpretations of common sense. So this should be clarified no matter
>> what.
> 
> Thus far, we've (I think) only seen people argue that:
> 
> 1) this is what the bylaws really mean, let us clarify it for the sake
> of less confusion some other day,
> 
> 2) The bylaws do not mean this and should not do this.
> 
> 
> Can I assume that means there is no one who feels this *should* be true,
> but currently *isn't*?
> 
> ...
> 
> Does anyone have any last-minute proposals to modify the wording for
> grammar etc. in the event that this is accepted?

The discussion period is over, time to vote!

https://aur.archlinux.org/tu/?id=102

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User



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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Eli Schwartz via aur-general]

On 01/23/2018 02:16 PM, Balló György via aur-general wrote:
>> Does anyone have any last-minute proposals to modify the wording for
>> grammar etc. in the event that this is accepted?
> 
> Sounds good for me. But how can we check if a TU modify a user account
> or do anything other than resolving package requests (which is tracked
> on aur-requests mailing list)? Currently these actions are untracked on
> aurweb, so we don't really know the last action. I think we need a
> 'last privileged action' field or 'privileged action log' or something
> similar to be implemented in aurweb, so any TU could easily check if
> the condition met or not.

We probably do need some way to track non-requests package deletions,
use of AUR_PRIVILEGED in the git backend, etc. But I will probably defer
to Lukas/Johannes for that, it sounds like it would involve php.

It's not like we were keeping track of this as we should up to now, so
that wouldn't really change.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User



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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Balló György via aur-general]

> Does anyone have any last-minute proposals to modify the wording for
> grammar etc. in the event that this is accepted?

Sounds good for me. But how can we check if a TU modify a user account
or do anything other than resolving package requests (which is tracked
on aur-requests mailing list)? Currently these actions are untracked on
aurweb, so we don't really know the last action. I think we need a
'last privileged action' field or 'privileged action log' or something
similar to be implemented in aurweb, so any TU could easily check if
the condition met or not.

--
György Balló
Trusted User

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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Eli Schwartz via aur-general]

On 01/18/2018 06:18 PM, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> Not everything that is available only to an aurweb account of the
> Trusted User type, qualifies as a TU "privilege"
> 
> Signed-off-by: Eli Schwartz 
> ---
> 
> Handy link to context and surrounding discussion:
> 
> https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-January/033789.html
> 
> The current wording of the bylaws indicates that there are two ways for
> a TU to qualify for special removal due to inactivity:
> 
> 1) Do not participate in voting, thereby potentially blockading a quorum.
> 
> 2) Do not participate in general TU'ish activities like maintaining
>[community], administrating the AUR and the packagers and users therein,
>being representative of TUs in general on this mailing list by being
>awesome and stuff, i.e. posting (hopefully useful information that helps
>AUR users), and... um... voting?
> 
> Point #2 calls out "performed any action that required TU privileges on
> the AUR", but does the tu voting interface on aurweb count as that or
> not? Moreover, do we *want* it to count? It seems to be somewhat
> defeating the purpose of the process, i.e. as long as a TU doesn't
> actually block quorum during a vote, they can remain while not actually
> performing any of the inherent functions of a TU.
> 
> Now, I would argue that under a common sense interpretation the original
> intent of the bylaws was almost certainly that voting does not count as
> a "TU privilege", since a TU is someone who has the "privilege" to
> administrate AUR packages and users in order to keep good order, and
> select good packages to upload to [community]. 
> 
> But bylaws exist in order to prevent people from having different
> interpretations of common sense. So this should be clarified no matter
> what.

Thus far, we've (I think) only seen people argue that:

1) this is what the bylaws really mean, let us clarify it for the sake
of less confusion some other day,

2) The bylaws do not mean this and should not do this.


Can I assume that means there is no one who feels this *should* be true,
but currently *isn't*?

...

Does anyone have any last-minute proposals to modify the wording for
grammar etc. in the event that this is accepted?

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User



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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Eli Schwartz via aur-general]

On 01/21/2018 04:19 PM, Lukas Fleischer via aur-general wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 at 21:40:43, Xyne wrote:
>> On 2018-01-21 10:04 +0100
>> Lukas Fleischer via aur-general wrote:
>>
>>> So you suggest to remove the first part of the condition (before the
>>> "OR") altogether?
>>
>> I made no such suggestion.
> 
> By your logic, there is no situation where the first part of the
> condition applies but the second part (after the "OR") does not. So we
> could as well remove the part before the "OR" -- and, if that were the
> case, we would have removed the statement before the amendment of the
> bylaws.
> 
> If what I am saying is not true, there might be a misunderstanding: in
> this case, please describe a situation where only the part before the
> "OR" applies but the part after the "OR" does not.

Well, strictly speaking in the event that there have been no prospective
votes in more than two months, but the TU in question did vote for the
votes from, say, three and four months ago but then dropped off the face
of the community for the last two months, they would qualify for special
removal under the part before the OR, but not the part after the OR.

I think that having to contrive that circumstance indicates that it is,
in fact, contrived and going against the intent.

> In fact, even if you really want to be pedantic and take everything in
> the bylaws literally, the first condition before the "OR" applies if a
> Trusted User does nothing but vote: in today's terminology, the "AUR" is
> the "Arch User Repository" (the collection of packages uploaded and
> maintained by users) and the web interface is called "aurweb", see [1].
> So, while voting is a TU action performed in aurweb, it is clearly not
> "any action that required TU privileges on the AUR" because the AUR
> (package collection) is not touched.

Indeed! I tried to make this evident in my initial proposal to this thread.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User



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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Lukas Fleischer via aur-general]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 at 21:40:43, Xyne wrote:
> On 2018-01-21 10:04 +0100
> Lukas Fleischer via aur-general wrote:
> 
> >So you suggest to remove the first part of the condition (before the
> >"OR") altogether?
> 
> I made no such suggestion.

By your logic, there is no situation where the first part of the
condition applies but the second part (after the "OR") does not. So we
could as well remove the part before the "OR" -- and, if that were the
case, we would have removed the statement before the amendment of the
bylaws.

If what I am saying is not true, there might be a misunderstanding: in
this case, please describe a situation where only the part before the
"OR" applies but the part after the "OR" does not.

> And again, the intention of the current bylaws was not to disregard voting as
> an activity. The first part was to speed up the process for TUs who show no
> visible online activity (i.e. TUs who have abandoned Arch completely, for
> whatever reason), and the second part was to remove those who prevent the
> establishment of quorum. A TU who votes is clearly still logging in to his or
> her account and not preventing quorum. So yeah, a TU who does nothing but vote
> for over a year should be removed, but by a regular removal process, which the
> bylaws already handle.

Makes no sense. See above. We would not have listed all the details of
what TU inactivity means if inactivity always implies the part after the
"OR".

> 
> Btw, we discussed this together over 4 years ago and we were in agreement then
> about both the intention and the formulation. Here's a message in which you
> clearly agreed with this intention:
> 
> https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2013-August/024783.html

I did agree that inactivity should be a sufficient condition for special
removal. I did never agree that inactivity requires not voting. In that
email, I even explained that I understand "work on the AUR" as
"uploading, updating and deleting packages".

In fact, even if you really want to be pedantic and take everything in
the bylaws literally, the first condition before the "OR" applies if a
Trusted User does nothing but vote: in today's terminology, the "AUR" is
the "Arch User Repository" (the collection of packages uploaded and
maintained by users) and the web interface is called "aurweb", see [1].
So, while voting is a TU action performed in aurweb, it is clearly not
"any action that required TU privileges on the AUR" because the AUR
(package collection) is not touched.

Regards,
Lukas

[1] https://git.archlinux.org/aurweb.git/plain/README

Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Xyne]

On 2018-01-21 10:04 +0100
Lukas Fleischer via aur-general wrote:

>So you suggest to remove the first part of the condition (before the
>"OR") altogether?

I made no such suggestion.

With the current bylaws, any 2 TUs can start a regular removal process for any
reason. This suffices to remove TUs who aren't "doing enough" according to the
majority of other TUs. The only difference from the special removal process is a
few more days and a higher quorum. The current bylaws are explicit and fine as
they are. There is no need to change them. 

A TU who still shows signs of recent online activity should be given the full
discussion period of a regular removal process to offer an explanation or
resignation. After all, all TUs have contributed to this community and were
recruited due to qualities that we recognized in them at the time of their
application. A few extra days to hear their them out before kicking them out
is a costless courtesy. Unless they are preventing quorum from being
established, there is absolutely no harm nor pressing need to speed up the
process.

Just to be clear, I support the proposed removals given the cited inactivity,
and I agree that doing nothing other than vote for over a year is not the
intended mission of a TU. The silence from both during the discussion period
is also strange given that they still log in to vote (vote timers?).

And again, the intention of the current bylaws was not to disregard voting as
an activity. The first part was to speed up the process for TUs who show no
visible online activity (i.e. TUs who have abandoned Arch completely, for
whatever reason), and the second part was to remove those who prevent the
establishment of quorum. A TU who votes is clearly still logging in to his or
her account and not preventing quorum. So yeah, a TU who does nothing but vote
for over a year should be removed, but by a regular removal process, which the
bylaws already handle.

Btw, we discussed this together over 4 years ago and we were in agreement then
about both the intention and the formulation. Here's a message in which you
clearly agreed with this intention:

https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2013-August/024783.html

You later approved my patch.

Regards,
Xyne

Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Lukas Fleischer via aur-general]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 at 04:24:49, Xyne wrote:
> > The intent of the first sectionm before the "OR", is to measure any sort of
> > activity. Updating a package, voting or posting a comment shows that the TU
> > is still logging in to the AUR and thus active in some sense. The point of
> > the first section was to provide a way to remove TUs who had simply
> > disappeared. This is as it should be. There is no mandated TU quota for
> > package actions.
> 
> > The intent of the second section, after the "OR", is to ensure that TUs who
> > repeatedly disregard votes and possibly prevent quorum from being 
> > established
> > can be removed.
> 
> The special removal procedure was only added to handle special cases where the
> TU has clearly abandoned Arch altogether (no detectable activity in the last
> two months) or the TU has simply ignored votes and thus jeopardized quorum,
> again over a period of two months or more.
> 
> The normal procedure should be used to remove a TU who has not impeded other
> TUs in their mission and who has been active within the last two months, which
> gives them time to offer an explanation or a resignation.

So you suggest to remove the first part of the condition (before the
"OR") altogether?

Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Xyne]

On 2018-01-19 09:16 +0100
Lukas Jirkovsky via aur-general wrote:

>My common sense tells me that activity that helps Arch Linux to
>prosper should be considered – be it packaging, triaging AUR requests
>etc.
>
>From that point of view, it makes sense to not count voting as TU
>activity, thereby blocking the potential removal.
>
>Just my 2 cents.
>
>Lukas



I oppose this patch and will vote against for the reasons given in my previous
reply on this list, which I repost here:


> The intent of the first sectionm before the "OR", is to measure any sort of
> activity. Updating a package, voting or posting a comment shows that the TU
> is still logging in to the AUR and thus active in some sense. The point of
> the first section was to provide a way to remove TUs who had simply
> disappeared. This is as it should be. There is no mandated TU quota for
> package actions.

> The intent of the second section, after the "OR", is to ensure that TUs who
> repeatedly disregard votes and possibly prevent quorum from being established
> can be removed.

The special removal procedure was only added to handle special cases where the
TU has clearly abandoned Arch altogether (no detectable activity in the last
two months) or the TU has simply ignored votes and thus jeopardized quorum,
again over a period of two months or more.

The normal procedure should be used to remove a TU who has not impeded other
TUs in their mission and who has been active within the last two months, which
gives them time to offer an explanation or a resignation.

Regards,
Xyne

Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Vanush Misha Paturyan via aur-general]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 06:18:11PM -0500, Eli Schwartz via aur-general wrote:
 
> +2. performed any action that required TU privileges on the AUR, for example
> +resolving package requests, modifying user accounts, or force pushing to a
> +package base, but NOT including participation in a voting period

I'm not a TU, but can I suggest replacing "for example" with "such
as"? "such as... but not including" sounds nicer.


-- 
Vanush "Misha" Paturyan
Senior Technical Officer
Room 120
Computer Science Department
Eolas Bulding
Maynooth University
Maynooth

ext: 4539


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Re: [aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Clarify the process for Special Removal of an inactive TU

[Lukas Jirkovsky via aur-general]

On 19 January 2018 at 00:18, Eli Schwartz via aur-general
 wrote:
> Not everything that is available only to an aurweb account of the
> Trusted User type, qualifies as a TU "privilege"
>
> Signed-off-by: Eli Schwartz 
> ---
>
> Handy link to context and surrounding discussion:
>
> https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2018-January/033789.html
>
> The current wording of the bylaws indicates that there are two ways for
> a TU to qualify for special removal due to inactivity:
>
> 1) Do not participate in voting, thereby potentially blockading a quorum.
>
> 2) Do not participate in general TU'ish activities like maintaining
>[community], administrating the AUR and the packagers and users therein,
>being representative of TUs in general on this mailing list by being
>awesome and stuff, i.e. posting (hopefully useful information that helps
>AUR users), and... um... voting?
>
> Point #2 calls out "performed any action that required TU privileges on
> the AUR", but does the tu voting interface on aurweb count as that or
> not? Moreover, do we *want* it to count? It seems to be somewhat
> defeating the purpose of the process, i.e. as long as a TU doesn't
> actually block quorum during a vote, they can remain while not actually
> performing any of the inherent functions of a TU.
>
> Now, I would argue that under a common sense interpretation the original
> intent of the bylaws was almost certainly that voting does not count as
> a "TU privilege", since a TU is someone who has the "privilege" to
> administrate AUR packages and users in order to keep good order, and
> select good packages to upload to [community].
>
> But bylaws exist in order to prevent people from having different
> interpretations of common sense. So this should be clarified no matter
> what.
>
>
>  tu-bylaws.txt | 4 +++-
>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/tu-bylaws.txt b/tu-bylaws.txt
> index c7a376e..27e4804 100644
> --- a/tu-bylaws.txt
> +++ b/tu-bylaws.txt
> @@ -142,7 +142,9 @@ A TU who has not done ANY of the following for a period 
> of at least 2 months:
>
>  1. added, removed or updated a package in +[community]+ or the AUR
>
> -2. performed any action that required TU privileges on the AUR
> +2. performed any action that required TU privileges on the AUR, for example
> +resolving package requests, modifying user accounts, or force pushing to a
> +package base, but NOT including participation in a voting period
>
>  3. posted a message to 
> https://mailman.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/aur-general[aur-general]
>
> --
> 2.16.0

My common sense tells me that activity that helps Arch Linux to
prosper should be considered – be it packaging, triaging AUR requests
etc.

>From that point of view, it makes sense to not count voting as TU
activity, thereby blocking the potential removal.

Just my 2 cents.

Lukas