From joey Mon Dec 19 18:39:28 2005 Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:39:28 -0500 X-OfflineIMAP-1326022817-6b697465-494e424f582e53656e74: 1135037001-0644317843492-v4.0.11 From: Joey Hess To: Manoj Srivastava Cc: Branden Robinson / Debian Project Leader , debian-ctte-private@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: [Branden Robinson / Debian Project Leader] solicitation for interest in joining Technical Committee Message-ID: <20051219233928.GA32095@kitenet.net> References: <87vexn6psv.fsf@glaurung.internal.golden-gryphon.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="ReaqsoxgOBHFXBhH" Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <87vexn6psv.fsf@glaurung.internal.golden-gryphon.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11 Status: RO Content-Length: 2875 Lines: 69 --ReaqsoxgOBHFXBhH Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Both I and my ego thank you for considering me (again) for the technical committee. Upon reviewing the recent decisions of the technical committee, I was struck by the slim influence that the committee's decisions seem to have on the project. Of the decisions listed on the web page: 1. After the committee went to great lengths to avoid cardinfo needing to be split out of pcmcia-cs, it was removed from the package this year with the comment from the (new) maintainer that: * Removed the graphical cardinfo utility. I don't think anybody uses it and it should be in a separate package anyway. 2. After overruling the kernel maintainer on whether versafb should be compiled into the kernel, he (I think) ignored the committee, added lots of patches to make it a module, and closed the bugs. Now 4 years later the new kernel maintainers are planning to ditch those patches due to the maintenance load, and build it into the kernel, which will finally comply with the committee's decision, although I don't know that the committee's ruling influenced their decision at all. 3. The maintainer of md5sum ignored for 1.5 years the committee's decision on its output. When someone finally noticed that change was not made, he stated that: I'm frankly going to ignore this unless the tech ctte revisits it. AFAICT this was dealt with in the tech ctte because it was a pet peeve of ian jackson. I find it vaguely disturbing that there was an entire thread about changing the behavior of a program in coreutils that *was never mentioned to the coreutils maintainer*.=20 4. amd64 is indeed being used as the name of that port, although it is still not an official Debian port. Newer architectures (such as armeb) seem to be getting their names decided without recourse the the technical committee. So with one success out of four, there seems to be a problem with either the follow-through on decisions of the committee, or not enough weight is being given to those decisions, or perhaps the issues that come to the committee are not actually very important compared to others in Debian. My time to work on Debian is not unlimited and this does not seem to be the most productive place I could spend it, so I must once again decline the offer to serve on the technical committee. --=20 see shy jo --ReaqsoxgOBHFXBhH Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: Digital signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDp0Swd8HHehbQuO8RAtuxAKCWoB5Rc4ltfWb3krsoysqzHHUk0QCg6IUb bM79Q6jtwAvLe7VEAGCiHRY= =SJ3L -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --ReaqsoxgOBHFXBhH--