[csw-maintainers] Our core values: providing straightforward experience to the user

[Peter FELECAN]

Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> writes:

> however, the examples you give, seem to mostly be in the flavor of
> "maintainer wants to avoid doing more work".

I don't think that this is very accurate. It's subjectiveness is
insulting to the *voluntary* work of the maintainers. It's not about
laziness but about pragmatic compromises chosen by the maintainer.

> On 11/24/10, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski <maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
>>...
>> A single person in power can also hurt package quality.  Imagine a
>> scenario in which there is a package, which has two issues, let's call
>> them A and B.  The package is unmaintained, and one maintainer takes
>> on the issue A, fixes it and submits the fix for release.  The updated
>> package is better than the previous one, but the release manager,
>> using his discretionary powers, rejects the package, saying that the
>> maintainer should fix issue B as well.  The maintainer feels he's
>> being controlled, the release manager believes he's right and insists,
>> and both end up in a deadlock.
>
>
> point #1: notice this is nothing about the maintainer avoiding "low
> quality"; this is simply about "maintainer does not wish to do extra
> work".

In your reality we are a bunch of lazy people isn't it?

> The "feeling controlled" complaint is just a passive-aggressive way of
> rephrasing "feeling pressured to do more work against his will".

This is cheap psychology.

>> Phil, I understand you mean well and you want packages to work well,
>> and I want the same thing.  But I believe that package quality should
>> not be based on what Phil Brown (or any single person, for that
>> matter) happens to think is right.  It should be based on what the
>> OpenCSW community agrees on.
>
> I'll mention that in most major free software distribution projects,
> the exact opposite is true. They do not handle every package release
> issue through "consensus of the members".
> To take debian, as usual: (and do note that it is arguably The Most
> Democratic of all distributions)
> The "ftp master" team, has virtually exclusive power over what gets
> released, and what does not.

That is a team. In our case we can consider that there is a team and
it's constituted only by one person. In North Korea they call it popular
democracy but that is not enough reason to qualify.

> Note also, that the ftp masters are not purely bound by debian policy either!
> While debian policy is the usual benchmark,
> "The ftpmasters also have room for discretion in applying the rules
> and may reject packages for other reasons"

This is cherry picking and I'm not surprised that you like this
part. However, their community have well defined policies when our has
very fluctuating and arbitrary policies where rules spring out of blue
sky, on the whims of the "release management team"; putting the release
management above the policies is like in the feodal regimes.

I'm not proposing a multi-person release management team but an
automatic release management based on agreed upon policies. Instead of
reinventing policies we can very easily adapt the Debian policies to our
community.

-- 
Peter