Colin Watson writes ("Re: CTTE and Developer Buy-in [Re: Bug#727708: init
system other points, and conclusion]"):
> Is there any useful way we could take a reasonably quick non-binding
> straw poll of developers? Sort of an "if we voted a particular way, is
> it likely that we would be on the wrong side of developer opinion".
I think this is very unlikely to produce useful answers. Non-binding
polls have the serious problem that everyone knows they're not
binding, so many people will simply not bother. And the result of
such an exercise is likely to influence our thinking more than it
ought.
In this context I want to say again thata I think that direct
democracy is a terrible way to make a technical decision. Our
thousands of contributors don't have the time to do the reading and
research needed to make a good decision.
And, despite the fact that the decision has become very politicised
(to some extent along the lines of preexisting camps of strongly
disagreeing contributors), I think it is primarily a technical
decision.
> This bug was referred to us so that we could take what we felt to be the
> technically best decision; I'm not saying we should shirk that
> responsibility and turn it into a straight opinion poll. But I would
> like to have the information, in a more structured way than looking at
> mailing list archives to try to work out how many people are shouting
> for each side. It would be quite relevant if we were about to try to
> mandate something that the vast majority of developers hate, since part
> of the evaluation is how practical each option will be to deploy widely.
If the vast majority of developers hate our decision, the GR process
would be the right way to fix it. In that case finding K Developers
to sponsor the GR would be trivial.
Obviously that would be embarrassing for us and substantially damage
our credibility. But I don't think it's at all likely. Do you ?
Ian.
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