Manoj Srivastava resigns as Debian secretary

Hi folks,

        I am hereby resigning as secretary, effective immediately. I was
 planning on leaving the office soon, anyway, but I had a rewrite of
 Devotee underway, which would have made the software more useful for
 different people (different checks --LDAP.gpg. and others), and allowed
 Devotee to be packaged as essentially a perl library, with vote
 protocols being perl scripts (debian-vote --config gr_lenny.cfg). But
 that is no longer a compelling reason to stay on.

        In the years I have spent in this role since Darren left us, I
 have tried to conduct the votes as I saw  the rquirements of the
 constitution, and the limitations of the voting software. But this not
 a view shared by very many people.

        I concede that I have made mistakes with the current set of
 votes. And the arguments being made now, after the vote was called and
 started, are fairly compelling. But these arguments could have been
 made when the vote page went up, when I was sending in the emails about
 which option had how many seconds, or when the draft ballot was sent
 in. There are, in my opinion, far more cogent arguments being offered
 now, than there were in the discussion period, and had these being made
 earlier, we would not have come to this pass.

        But that is merely an excuse. The buck fir running votes stops
 at the secretary, so I am ultimately responsible for the current state
 of the vote. And I am begnning to see that the ballot was wrong.

        Mistakes happen. Mistakes can be recovered from. What can not,
 however, is relationships, and trust, and this works both ways.  It has
 been made clear to me that the project no longer trusts me, and many
 consider that I have been the epitome of sleaze over the years,
 manipulating votes for my own ends. That hurts. I have also read
 planet. The amount of vitriol there makes it untenable for me to
 participate in any efforts to recover from this mess.

        Life is too short. This is way too much stress at a point in my
 life where there is too much stress to deal with.

        I am asking the DSA to remove me  from the debvote group,
 effective now.


        As to the people who emailed me that they are putting together a
 petition for the DAM to have me removed from the project, I hear you
 too. I am going to spend the next few days evaluating how important the
 project is to me, and whether I should save you the bother or an
 expulsion process.

        While I must say that the mistake for this ballot lies at my
 door, I am very distressed at the amount of vitriol that saturates the
 project communication channels now. Subjectively, this seems worse now
 than the flame filled days of yore -- because, back then, despite the
 apparent flames, people used to be amicable and friendly with the
 people they occasionally had heated discussion with. That seems to have
 passed, with real meanness being far more prevalent than before.

        Any way. Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.

        manoj
-- 
Freedom from incrustation of grime is contiguous to rectitude.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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