On 16/09/14 01:00, lee wrote:
Shall we have a vote? AFAIK, there's nothing that would speak against
having one, in this very mailing list. Why not ask the users? Why
should only Debian developers be allowed to vote but not the users?
Quite aside from the general DEbian principle of "do-ocracy":
The Debian Developers are a strongly-identifiable group; as I understand
it, becoming a DD requires an existing DD to vouch for you, and certain
key activities performed by DDs require the use of public-key
cryptographic signatures using a key which has been signed by other DDs
to indicate that they believe it is indeed your key. One of those
activities is casting a valid vote on a General Resolution.
The Debian Technical Committee is a strongly-identifiable group within
the group of Debian Developers, to whom certain kinds of dispute may be
referred for resolution. Being selected from among the Debian
Developers, their identities can be verified in much the same way.
(Obviously, a DD's cryptographic keys could be compromised by social
engineering attacks or malware infection of the computer on which they
keep the keys. However, they are at least a *starting* point for
believing a vote to have been legitimately cast.)
Debian users, on the other hand, are very much *not* a
strongly-identifiable group; there is no formal mechanism whatsoever for
being endorsed as an Official Debian User. As such, a vote "by the
users" can, *at best*, be a vaguely indicative straw poll of those bona
fide users who feel strongly enough about matters to participate in the
first place; at worst, it will be a magnet for trolls, astroturfers,
shills, and other such reprobates.
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