A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 11:47 UTC (Thu) by avheimburg (guest, #75272)
Parent article: This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

To me, this looks like a political decision and not a technical one. Thus, it is very hard if not impossible to decide using technical criteria.

Is Debian a GNU distribution whose Linux variant happens to have the biggest install base, or id Debian a Linux distribution with some ports? Who is the target audience of the distribution? For what usage scenarios does Debian want to optimize? That is the discussion that should be happening.

Once the political stage is set, the technical decision becomes much easier.

A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 14:01 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

According to Debian's Social Contract, its priorities are »its users and free software«. If more than 99.9% of these users are using the Linux kernel, it stands to reason that Debian ought to provide the best experience to this vast majority. This effectively implies making systemd the default init system.

A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 15:00 UTC (Thu) by avheimburg (guest, #75272) [Link] (2 responses)

That's what are reading into it. It never says so explicitly. And whether your reading of the Social Contract is the correct reading or not is the kind of political issue that has to be answered.

As you point out, when that has been answered, the technical decision is not hard.

A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 15:22 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

What part of §4 of the Social Contract do you find unclear?

A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 16:44 UTC (Thu) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

The part where it's missing a section requiring community members with obvious conflicts of interest to recuse themselves from TC votes...

A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 15:09 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

IMO sending the broader political decision ("I'd like to ask the tech-ctte to
please vote on and decide on the default init system for Debian.") to the ctte was a bad move. If the question had been, 'which init system should Debian GNU/Linux use' then the question is purely a technical one.

A TC cannot decide on a political issue

Posted Jan 30, 2014 17:16 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

You are right in that it is now a political decision *because* the technical criteria and politics do not align. If Upstart was the technically superior system then this would be an easy decision and already made, the reason this is contentious is because everyone knows Upstart is not the best, even the Upstart developers, or they would be able to engage based on technical criteria rather than politics.

The question is whether Debian can make independent decisions for the betterment of itself and its users or if it is just part of Ubuntu and needs to submit to whatever decisions are made for Ubuntu, which is the most popular version of Debian.