Re: Draft resolution formalising Debian's Associated Project status

On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 10:47:22PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote:
> Does everything really have to be spelled out like that? Surely the board
> can exercise some common sense in preventing people from making duplicate
> and/or pointless queries, and not have to resort to this kind of verbosity?

It's not a matter of the board preventing people from contacting us,
since we're not going to be going around engaging in censorship. And in
any case, this was about informing us know of a bad situation, not about
making any sort of query. The tricky part was how to word the request we
were making. Ian's wording requested that the person guess as to whether
the board was likely to find out about the situation, which could lead
to radically different judgments depending on how involved the person is
in the issue in question. My wording (which Ian was fine with) simply
asked them to do a quick objective look out there to see if it looks
like we've been notified. Verbosity can actually lead to better results.

It also might not have seemed so verbose if I had broken it up into two
paragraphs.

> I know it doesn't seem like this to you now, but a few years from now, this
> might actually sound like SPI showing a priori contempt for people trying to
> notify it about the aforementioned problems...

Why would they think that given that it's in the same paragraph as an
explicit request to notify us for those problems?

> Ian's version seemed just fine to me, except that it could have used the
> words 'according to the Debian Constitution' somewhere, just to make sure
> that we're talking about real disputes and not any random chatter.

It was substantively different in the regard I mentioned above, but also
in that it would have us depend on DDs and others to let us know about
disagreements on decisions themselves, which is none of SPI's business,
rather than disagreements on the authority of the decisionmakers to make
a decision relevant to SPI, which is most definitely our business.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy(at)spi-inc(dot)org