A few comments: - We have a strong history in Sage of conducting votes, and I absolutely think we need to do that for this issue. We also have a history (with perhaps a small number of exceptions) of having majority rule, and I think that's what we should do here: no need for a 2/3 vote.
An aside: I am chair of our department, and we have a governance structure, including an executive committee. Earlier this year the committee proposed a policy to the whole department and brought it to a meeting for a vote. The discussion was contentious and the vote ended up with more yes than no votes, but there were also a number of abstentions, and the total number of yes votes was under 50% of the total present. Shortly after, I proposed, and the executive committee accepted, that we not put the new policy into place: our department has a strong preference for something closer to consensus than that. Sage does not have any such governance structure, so I don't think we can behave this way: we can't wait until the votes are cast before deciding how to interpret the results (not that anyone was proposing this), but I also think we can't decide that this vote should require a supermajority. It feels very arbitrary: why this vote but not so many others? We should hold a vote where the majority wins. If we want to develop more of a structure, including some sort of criteria for when we want majority votes vs. supermajority votes, we can do that, but I don't think it makes sense to try to put it in place for this issue. - Regarding Gitlab: there has been very little discussion of it: the discussion has focused on Github and trac. If we are expected to consider Gitlab in addition, we need more information. In particular, starting a vote early next week is too early. - Some people with strong opinions said that they are not ready to formulate their views. My impression is that trac is now doing okay, and I don't see a reason to rush a vote. I would propose that people work on David's list of pros and cons (thank you for working on that!), and we start a vote around October 1. We may or may not want to include Gitlab among the options; are there any actual proponents of it? -- John On Friday, September 16, 2022 at 1:19:35 AM UTC-7 David Roe wrote: > I've started working on a list of pros and cons > <https://github.com/sagemath/sage/wiki/Github-vs-Gitlab-vs-trac> to be > included in the email proposing a vote. Even though I favor the switch, > I've tried to accurately and neutrally describe the arguments in each > direction. I welcome help and additions, but please keep them in this > spirit (conversely, if you feel like I'm misrepresenting an argument or > making unjustified claims, please let me know). > > There has also been some discussion of how the vote should be carried out. > > * There was a proposal to make the deadline two weeks after the call for > the vote. That sounds fine to me. > * I intend to include a plea for people to keep discussion on a separate > thread rather than the voting thread. > * There was a proposal for people who have been more involved somehow to > have their votes count extra. I don't think this is a good idea: it's not > clear how to draw the line or what the weighting should be, and I think > it's more likely to cause resentment than alleviate it. > * There hasn't been much discussion of Github vs Gitlab on this thread, > but theoretically there are three choices in play. Given that, we face > Arrow's theorem in picking a voting system (especially if we also want to > allow people to abstain). I'm normally in favor of a Borda count > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count> variant, but with three > options and Github and Gitlab more similar to each other than to trac, I > propose Ranked pairs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs> for a > voting system. I suspect there may be voting theory experts lurking, so > I'm happy to hear other opinions. > * There was a proposal to require 2/3 either in favor of a switch or not > opposing. I'm open to this, but would be interested in hearing other > opinions. Perhaps we allow people to abstain, and then require that at > least 2/3 either abstain or prefer the winner to trac? With this in place, > maybe our voting system doesn't actually matter, but it's probably safer to > pick one. > > Given that I want to get feedback on the voting system and the > pros-and-cons, I'll wait until at least Monday to send out a request for a > vote (longer if the discussion is still going strong or if the workflow > proposal > <https://github.com/sagemath/sage/wiki/migration-from-trac-to-Git**b> is > still in flux). > David > > On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 3:41 AM Matthias Koeppe <matthia...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> On Thursday, September 15, 2022 at 11:57:35 PM UTC-7 seb....@gmail.com >> wrote: >> >>> About ten years before Google was on Earth someone put a poster on our >>> corridor of the University building: *Microsoft free area*. We all were >>> proud about that. But at that point nobody knew what should come later on. >>> >> >> Of course. Many of us shared this position back in the days when >> Microsoft was absolutely hostile to open source and in particular to the >> GPL. >> >> But it's just not applicable today. Microsoft (which GitHub is a >> subsidiary of) is the single biggest contributor to open source software. >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "sage-devel" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to sage-devel+...@googlegroups.com. >> > To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/867d0ba7-22e6-466e-8350-b660c312992dn%40googlegroups.com >> >> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/867d0ba7-22e6-466e-8350-b660c312992dn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> >> . >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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