Hello, On Fri 21 Jun 2024 at 12:40pm -07, Russ Allbery wrote:
> This is the soapbox that I climb onto whenever a GR is proposed, and I > guess I need to climb onto it again. More fundamentally than my position > on any given GR, I am on team closure. One of the worst and, I would > argue, actually abusive things that Debian systematically does to people > is string them along for long periods of time saying neither yes or no. I > personally would rather be told "no" than "maybe" if the "maybe" involves > staying in limbo for months or years. > > Obviously it's not my GR and I'm not going to make any of those decisions. > Maybe the tag2upload maintainers would prefer "maybe" to "no" and that's > their choice to make. But if it were me, I'd want this concluded here and > now so that I can either deploy my thing or abandon it and find something > else to do with my time and, more importantly, my emotional energy. > > We've just done a whole ton of work to reach a better shared understanding > of all of the corners of the problem, and I for one have spent a truly > absurd amount of time and energy over the past week trying to make the > problem clear. It makes no sense to me, and I think would be actively > cruel, to stop now and have to substantial amounts of that work all over > again some time later. Debian is profligate in wasting the time and > energy of its contributors already; we don't need to make it worse. > > I am frequently told that Debian is a do-ocracy: the people who are > willing to do the work have wide latitude over how that work is done. One > of the implications of that is that delegates don't get to force other > people to do their work in arbitrarily different ways just because they > would personally like that better. There is an obligation that comes with > the delegate position to only block things for clear and important reasons > that matter, and to do that, one also has to be *correct*. If I make a > delegate decision on an incorrect basis, I am wrong and I can and should > be overridden. Very well said. -- Sean Whitton
