On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 08:46:54PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote: > On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 04:18:19AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 11:04:03PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > > The draft so far adds no such proscription for the admins > > > (indeed, the whole point is to remove such a proscription).
> > Yes. If the Social Contract had a provision proscribing the Debian > > Account Managers from disabling developers' accounts, and we voted by a > > landslide to remove that proscription, would it follow that the Debian > > Account Managers should immediately disable all developers' accounts? > > After all, they'd have a mandate, right? > It would follow, so far as I can see, that they would deactivate developer > accounts under whatever criteria they saw fit. Given the proscription that > existed previously against doing so, this would (likely) raise the number > of such events from 0. > Raising the specter of disabling all accounts is both hyperbole; however, > it is not unthinkable that the FTP admins would take the removal of the > terms regarding non-free as a mandate allowing them to remove portions of > the archive as they saw fit, beyond the current standards applied to all > packages. Er, I'm not sure what you mean by a mandate /allowing/ something. A mandate that does not /compel/ is no mandate at all. > Perhaps they would, and perhaps not. I'm not even saying that I disagree > with removing the clause about supporting non-free. But I do firmly believe > that, short of a clearly expressed opinion in the GR itself directing them > to take a certain course of action (removal, or continued support status > quo, or some other option), they will excercise their power in whatever > manner they see fit. This seems a reasonable conclusion. > Given that it would take another GR for the developers as a whole to > formally counter this, I'd prefer to simply settle the question in the > first pass (besides, it's polite to the folks we're asking to do the work > to tell them what, exactly, we want them to do). Unless you hold the view that the GR to amend the SC isn't actually asking anyone to *do* anything? :) -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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