Who controls glibc?

In the Quaker tradition of consensus decision making, it's a matter of making a best effort to find what the group as a whole wants.

In that tradition it's considered a mistake to try to build a consensus without hearing from at least most of the members. However, it's also built around the idea that people who are going to participate essentially opt into discussion in certain areas, and have explicitly taken on the duty of participating, even when it's time consuming and slow, which are par for the course in classic consensus decision making. Essentially, everyone is given time to speak about what they think and what they feel, and when the turn comes to you, you can't just pass or stay silent. It would be difficult to adapt this fully to an online medium. Functioning well, this can include outcomes such as participants deciding that they really are too far outside the group needs/wants to be part of the decision and essentially pulling up their stake. It can also include the group as a whole working hard to understand the views and opinions of one who sees it quite differently.

In the general modern interpretation of consensus decision making, participants are often far less committed to fully participate, and would rather simply ignore issues that are insufficiently important to them, or have a poor ratio of importance to expected annoyance. In such an environment, I really don't see what you can do besides try to remember that each participant's views should be given real consideration, and at the same time that it is important and necessary to find the outcome/view/decision that best represents the group overall. Even that is hard to instill in a free assocation of developers, and I think it's generally not perceived that this mode of thinking is important and possibly essential.

In short, consensus is hard. We're not really trained to do it. Most of us don't really fully appreciate the components to achieve it. Expecting strong consensus on mailing lists is perhaps a foolish pursuit. But considering how things are playing out here, I do wish more of the participants valued those principles.