+1
Olga Natkovich wrote:
I am fine with them "as-is"
Olga
-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Gates [mailto:ga...@yahoo-inc.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 1:16 PM
To: Thejas M Nair
Cc: pig-u...@hadoop.apache.org
Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Apache Pig bylaws
Comments inlined. However, I feel like we're getting stuck in a
rathole on this one issue of consensus and 2/3's votes. So I would
like to ask two questions now:
1) Are there any other issues besides voting we feel should be
discussed before we move to a vote?
2) For those who have expressed concern about the voting, are these
concerns enough to make you not vote for these bylaws, or can you live
with it as is? I am concerned that this discussion could go on with
point and counter point ad infinitum. I'm more interested in having
bylaws than in having perfect bylaws. We can amend them as necessary
as we go.
Alan.
On Oct 4, 2010, at 9:28 AM, Thejas M Nair wrote:
The bylaws look good, but I would like to raise two issues -
Shouldn¹t the majority requirement for changing the bylaws be more
strict
than those required by the actions in bylaws ?
For example, the bylaw for removing a committer requires a
consensus, but
for changing this by-law requires only 2/3rd majority. Ie,
effectively,
2/3rd majority can remove a committer !
Should changing the bylaws should require consensus as well?
I don't want to make it consensus to change the bylaws, as that would
make changing bylaws _very_ hard. I want removing a committer to be
_very_ hard.
And, in defense of having changing procedure require a lower vote than
the procedure, I would invoke the practices of the US Senate. A
simple majority vote would suffice to remove the need for 3/5 majority
(60 votes) for cloture, yet even when one party has 50 but not 60
votes (as has been common lately) neither has removed it for fear of
having it used against them later. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture#United_States
for details.
Should we consider another unlikely situation ? - What if two
committers are
unable to communicate for long duration for some reason (stuck on some
lonely island without internet!)? Actions that require consensus
approval
would not be possible. (you can't remove a inactive voter and then
have
another consensus vote because two voters are missing).
Should we have a maximum duration for casting votes that require
consensus ?
(2 months ?)
My attempt to deal with the Lost scenario was the addition of the
sentence saying that votes should not be called when we knew members
would be unavailable.
Also, I want to clarify the difference between inactive committers/PMC
members and members being removed. Moving to emeritus status is
automatic upon inactivity. ("A PMC member is considered 'emeritus' by
their own declaration or by not contributing in any form to the
project for over six months. An emeritus member may request
reinstatement to the PMC, which will be sufficient to restore him or
her to active PMC member.") Also, moving to emeritus status is not
considered a bad thing. It simply reflects that the person is no
longer able to be a part of the project on a regular basis. Removing
someone by vote is a bad thing, akin to being voted off the island (to
switch island TV show analogies), is certainly not automatic, and
should only happen in extreme circumstances.
Alan.
