Tollef Fog Heen writes ("Re: Proposal: s have a GR about the init system"):
> Both Colin and Steve are excellent developers. I see no need for any of
> them to recuse themselves because of their employer. Whether Steve
> should recuse himself due to him being the maintainer of one of the
> packages is something I leave to him and the CTTE.
I think he shouldn't recuse himself.
When I wrote the constitutional rules on this, I considered this kind
of question. The root of my thinking was this: ultimately the same
reasons why a TC member might want to vote in a particular way, are
also reasons why they might get involved in the maintenance of a
particular program.
I haven't spoken to Steve about this in the context of upstart, but it
seems very likely that the (mostly technical) reasons that lead Steve
to prefer upstart for Debian are substantially the same reasons as got
Steve involved in working on upstart in the first place.
Looking at it this way, requiring a recusal from TC members in these
kind of situations would lead to a situation where a TC member who
felt strongly about an impending controversy might avoid applying
their technical skills to software development so that they wouldn't
look biased when the controversy came to the TC. This seems quite
relevant to the current issue - I think a TC referral has been
foreseeable for some time.
To give another example: should I have avoided writing dgit myself, so
that if it comes to some kind of dispute about how Debian's git
integration should happen, and how dpkg-source should behave, I would
have a clear field to push my views in the TC ?
The constitution makes an exception for votes to overrule, where the
maintainer being overruled doesn't get a vote; otherwise it would be
just too hard to overrule a TC member. I thought those narrow
criteria for recusal were sufficient, and I still do.
Ian.
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