This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

Posted Jan 30, 2014 17:09 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns" by kugel
Parent article: This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

It's still a democratic vote and Canonical is a large partner with Debian so their opinion matters and should be taken into account. It might not pick the "right" answer and the technically superior option but it's still *fair*.

This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

Posted Jan 30, 2014 18:20 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

The tech-ctte is not a democratically elected body, and its composition is not intended to reflect the composition of the Debian community. On the other hand, it is the technical committee and, as such, ought to arrive at its resolutions by looking at technical, rather than political, issues – which is why the people on the committee are picked because they supposedly have a deep understanding of the technical side of Debian and can be relied upon to make impartial decisions on that basis.

Considering this, it is very aggravating if the position of someone on the tech-ctte looks as if it hinges not on technical points, but on the agenda of whoever signs their paycheck. The Upstart side of the debate has so far been fairly light on technical detail but heavy on mud-slinging and obfuscation, which is disgraceful and an insult to those people on the committee who actually went and performed their own research without a preconceived notion of what the result ought to be.

This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

Posted Jan 30, 2014 20:22 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

> it is the technical committee and, as such, ought to arrive at its resolutions by looking at technical, rather than political, issues – which is why the people on the committee are picked because they supposedly have a deep understanding of the technical side of Debian and can be relied upon to make impartial decisions on that basis.
That seems a bit naive. Non-trivial technical decisions are about tradeoffs. Systemd trades portability for features, performance, robustness, integration. Which of these should be preferred isn't a technical question, it depends on the goals of the users and the project's developers, and those are hard to determine. That's not a technical question any longer, that's a social-scientific question. I think I know the answer, but others seem to have more doubts.

This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

Posted Jan 30, 2014 20:47 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

[…] it depends on the goals of the users and the project's developers, and those are hard to determine.

Which raises the question of why one would ask the technical committee to make the decision in the first place. The tech-ctte's job is to arbitrate technical disagreements between developers; it isn't the tech-ctte's job to gauge »users' and developers' goals« in order to prescribe project policy.

Since we're very probably going to have a GR anyway, we can only hope that the Debian developers will at least look at the tech-ctte's deliberations before voting. This should acquaint them not only with, e.g., Russ Allbery's very detailed write-up explaining why, based on his own unprejudiced comparison, he prefers systemd to Upstart, but also with the discussion tactics of the Canonical camp.