Re: Debating difficult development issues in essay form
On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 08:45:08PM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote: The executive summary: We'd like to see more thoughtful debates of important Debian development issues, and have created http://wiki.debian.org/Debate as a way to encourage them. Dear Lars and Russ, thanks for this initiative. I applaud the effort and generally agrees this is something worth trying. We've been asking people to summarize discussions in the past, but most often we did so asking new summaries on lists, and that is prone to the lack of a running documentation for a given discussion at hand. What you propose might be a solution to that, aside from having other nice properties. Let's see how it goes! I've a general question here and a couple of more detailed comments inline below. Question: there are various overlaps from this proposal and DEPs ( http://dep.debian.net/ ). Not only in some of the explicit goals you state (e.g. documenting the state of discussions), but also in the fact that other FOSS communities out there are using DEP-like solutions to address the debating difficulty. Given that Lars has been one of the main proponents of DEPs, I suspect you have put quite some thought on the relationships of the two approaches. Can you share with us what you think are the pro/con of this wrt DEPs? * Write a document explaining your point of view. Make it as convincing as you can. If you like, gather a group of like-minded people to help write the document. Add your names to the end of the page so it's clear whose viewpoint it represents. About this, it's not clear to me if you actually encourage sign-offs from people other than the original authors or not. There's no mention of it here, but Russ' answer to Wouter on -project seems to hint at the fact that they would be welcome. (Yes, it's very clear to me that this is not a voting system, but I think sign-offs, possibly clearly differentiated from the essay authors / proposal drivers, might be useful. In fact, I think this is very similar to the proposer/seconds distinction we have in GRs, which I find useful in the initial phase of the opinion formation process.) If this is something you encourage, I suggest adding a Signed-off section to your page template. * Publish the document on as a subpage of the topic page in the wiki. Add a link to the subpage from the topic page. Technical hint: subpages syntax in Moin can be quite frustrating, especially for those who do not often edit Moin pages. It might be useful to have some sample (dangling) links for subpages pointing to alternative positions directly in the page template. (Of course I can implement the above changes myself in the wiki, but first I need to know if you agree with them or not :-)) Thanks again for this initiative, Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debating difficult development issues in essay form
Hi, On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 08:45:08PM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote: We think discussions on Debian development mailing lists sometimes suffer from repetition of facts, opinions, and arguments. During a long discussion of a controversial topic, it is hard for anyone to keep track of what has been said, and so everything tends to get repeated. ... +1 I really like this idea. The only problem I have is: How to know in advance whether a debate might concern a difficult development issue or not. For instance when I wrote my first mail about uscan enhancement[1] I did not expected this to be a complex topic but the various threads afterwards have shown this later. We intuitively followed your suggestion by creating[2] but I'm not yet fully convinced that this is a difficult development issue. Using this example as criterion I'd say we are seeing something that qualifies as difficult development issue if: 1. At least 10 postings on this topic (with on this topic I mean *really* on topic and no troll / fun posts) 2. At least two different threads to the same topic both with at least five postings. I know that the numbers are perfectly debatable but I'm mentally using these. I would not see these criterions as a requirement to enter a Wiki Debate but I would recommend starting a Wiki Debate if the criterion is met. Considering this would you agree to turn [2] into a Debate or would you apply further creterions for this? Kind regards Andreas. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/08/msg00380.html [2] http://wiki.debian.org/UscanEnhancements -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130510100657.gg15...@an3as.eu
Re: Debating difficult development issues in essay form
Op donderdag 9 mei 2013 23:40:45 schreef Wouter Verhelst: I do agree that sometimes, mailinglists aren't the best possible medium to hold a discussion. However, I'm not convinced that your proposal is the best way to fix that. I think that with all its flaws, mailinglists (and/or usenet) are still the best option we have for discussing important matters. I believe we're already using the form that Lars and Russ described, in the context of GR's. On the mailinglist, people collaboratively construct a short essay that they think rightly makes the case for their option. Others may construct a complete counterpoint, but there's also the form where you agree with the essay but want to change one aspect of it (an amendment). In the GR process these options are then put to the vote and even votes that didn't read all of debian-vote can make an informed decision by reading each of the options put forth that document the motivations. The proposed system seems to work well, and I don't know why it couldn't equally work well when ported to the non-voting-context of debian-devel. Cheers, Thijs signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Squeeze closer to the stars (Re: Debian GNU/Linux at NASA international space station laptops)
On Thu, May 09, 2013 at 10:54:49PM -0400, Filipus Klutiero wrote: On 2013-05-08 22:03, Filipus Klutiero wrote: On 2013-05-08 21:48, Paul Wise wrote: On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:15 AM, Andre Felipe Machado wrote: Read more about why NASA migrated the ISS laptops to Debian GNU/Linux: http://www.zdnet.com/to-the-space-station-and-beyond-with-linux-714958/ https://identi.ca/notice/100889633 http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/publicity/dpn/en/current/index.wml?view=co Wow... it's too bad wheezy didn't leave quite enough space to squeeze in that announcement while squeeze was still the Star! Paul Tagliamonte has contributed a pun more suited for a PR: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2013/05/msg00025.html Feel free to use it for a debbits post or whatever :) Cheers, T -- .''`. Paul Tagliamonte paul...@debian.org : :' : Proud Debian Developer `. `'` 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag signature.asc Description: Digital signature
