On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 12:55 PM, R0b0t1 <r03...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I can't tell, and I suspect other people can't either. >
This is the crux of the issue. Decisions involving people issues are made behind closed doors, which means that others are not free to confirm for themselves whether those actions are correct. This tends to lead to ongoing debate over whether those decisions were appropriate, with everybody arguing from their own knowledge, and the only ones who know the information used to make the decision are barred from talking about it. This is basically a debate where participation is limited to the ignorant, at least as far as the particular details go (the general principles are debated by all). That said, even if the decisions were made in the open I wouldn't expect all to agree with them. Ultimately though there are pros and cons to making these kinds of decisions in the open, and there is not universal agreement regarding how these situations ought to be handled. We can either fight about it until the end of time, or we can agree on some way to determine what approach we are going to take and then support it (perhaps begrudgingly). Right now the mechanism that we have in place is the Council. The only other mechanism I could see that would make any sense would be a referendum on the issue. That gets unwieldy if we try to apply it to every little decision, but maybe for the big picture issues it would make sense. However, I think a lot of people would be surprised at the outcome. We all assume that we're all here for the same reasons, but as I commented on my blog Gentoo is a bit unique among distros and many of us are here for very different reasons, and have different priorities. Also, there is sometimes a tendency to assume that all FOSS projects work the same way. When I was listening to a talk about how one of the BSDs dealt with these kinds of issues I was shocked to discover that much of their dev communications happens on completely closed lists (not just closed to posting, but to reading as well). Gentoo has the gentoo-core list but it is very low traffic and it tends to be used for things like swapping cell phone numbers before conferences. When anything substantive comes up there are usually several people who chime in to rightly point out that this talk belongs on a public list. Bottom line is that there are a lot of different ways projects can run, and they all have their pros and cons. A lot of the FOSS we depend on actually gets built or discussed behind closed doors. I doubt many of us want Gentoo to go that far, but I suspect there is a lot of interest in taking smaller steps in that general direction. -- Rich
