At 2025-01-15T20:25:04+0100, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > On Wed, 15 Jan 2025, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > >Quoting Thorsten Glaser (2025-01-15 00:50:55) > >> There should be something in this that says that they need to do so > >> in a way that matches ftpmaster policies. > > > >Do we really need to explicitly codify "please work well together > >with your fellow DDs" in the task description of delegates? > > That’s not what I said.
No indeed. > What I said was, design and run the service in a way so that > ftpmaster’s policies on what gets into Debian and how are honoured, > i.e. have precedence in case of doubt, too. Right. But that's not the Debian Way. Or rather, doing it that way is _precisely_ the Debian Way. Making it official...that's more contested. A naïf would read Debian's Social Contract and Constitution, at least as of its form up to 2007,[1] and conclude that organizationally, we have a severe allergy to hierarchy. In practice, we have tiers both outside the community of Debian Developers officially constituted, with Sponsored Maintainers and Debian Maintainers, and, increasingly, within--witness the current struggle to establish "officially cooperative" developers (doubleplusgood!) who use Gitlab exclusively for package maintenance, and unofficially "jerkass" developers who maintain packages in any other way.[2] I reckon that, like the proposal and ratification of the Debian Constitution itself, the DM GR was an unwelcome development in the eyes of those who saw the Debian Project as a "do-ocracy", wherein one does essentially whatever one can get away with, with the only governing principle being one's own "character", meaning one's sense of self-restraint. The vulnerability of such an informal process to social engineering attacks, extortion, or other forms of pressure (like direction from a manager at one's employer), is, in the eyes of some, preferable to having to operate within a rule-based system. That's the hill James Troup chose to metaphorically die upon--better dead than delegated to. I note with interest the continuing tension between the "core team"/"commit bit"/"ftpmaster" approach to governance and the "constitutional"/"rule-based"/"legalistic" one. I need an anthropologist to teach me how to sort out the parameters of this struggle. Does Biella Coleman have a Ph.D. student who needs a thesis topic? Regards, Branden [1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003 [2] https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/merge_requests/8
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