Re: [gentoo-dev] Email subdomain

[Grant Goodyear]

Corey Shields wrote: [Fri Nov 18 2005, 10:42:30PM CST]
> Still screwed up.  Lesson learned, make friends with a majority of the
> council, write and propose a glep the day before a meeting and then push it
> through.  wow.  sounds a lot like American politics.

That's quite an indictment.  You've skipped right past the notion that
perhaps a mistake was made to accuse the Council of cronyism.  As
somebody who's been part of devrel, and thus the recipient of exactly
that type of response more than once, I would think that you would have
known (and done) better.

Incidentally, the GLEP was originally revised and posted on glep.g.o on
11 November before the 2000 UTC deadline to request being added to the
agenda for the 15 Nov. meeting.  When hparker updated the GLEP he made a
rookie mistake, and forgot to update the Post-History field, so when I
looked at the GLEP I assumed that it hadn't been updated.  It's clear
that the GLEP authors assumed that they just needed to incorporate the
changes that the Council suggested, and that approval would be pro
forma.  In fact, they should have submitted the GLEP to -dev for another
round of comments.  Indeed, this GLEP reveals that there are a number of
misconceptions in how the GLEP process is supposed to work.

Here's what was supposed to happen.  (Yes, it's my fault for not
ensuring that it did, and I very much apologize.)  After a GLEP is
approved by the GLEP editor for posting to glep.g.o, the GLEP is sent to
-dev for comments.  Sane disputes should then be incorporated into a
revision of the GLEP, where such disputes should be addressed and either
incorporated or rejected with an explanation of why.  There were,
indeed, a number of disagreements with this GLEP when it was first
released, and they are not at all documented in the GLEP.  This process
is iterated until some sort of steady state is reached, at which point
the GLEP authors are supposed to tell the GLEP editor that they are
ready for it to go up for approval.  This step is actually fairly
important, since the GLEP editor is responsible for determining who the
"controlling authority" is for the GLEP.  A full Council vote is only
needed on GLEPs that are cross-project (or that lack a project).  Both
times that this GLEP went up for approval I should have been much more
assertive in stating that this GLEP was not yet ready.  (It's not the
GLEP editor's place to prevent a GLEP from going up for approval,
however.  The assumption is that a not-yet-ready GLEP will simply be
voted down.)

In any event, mistakes happen.  The real question is what to do next.
This GLEP has been approved, for good or ill.  Either the GLEP authors
can offer a revision that incorporates the disputes that are coming up
now (and that came up before but were never addressed),
or somebody can write a new GLEP that would supersede this one,
or people can just live with the current version.  In any case, you have
my apology for not doing a very good job with this one.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76