Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Social Contract, Council: please fix the mess you cause

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 8:40 PM, Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera
(klondike) <klondike@g.o> wrote:
>
> "Comments by selected people are welcome. "

And this would be why I've maintained that having non-overlapping
Council/Trustees is a problem waiting to happen.  We have two
governing bodies that disagree and continue to escalate things, in
part because we don't allow an overlap in membership and there are
only so many people interested in either job to go around.

My prediction is that everybody will continue to get indignant leading
up to the next Council election, then the developers will vote to
maintain the status quo, and then at the next Trustee election there
will be at most 0-2 extra nominees above the number of open slots, who
will probably be motivated mostly out of disagreement with the
Council, and then we'll get to watch the infighting for another year.

The whole GLEP 39 thing only works if people actually abide by the
decisions that are made.  Face it, when it comes down to things like
whether we boot people out for sexual harassment or not, or whether we
let their defenders claim that they were innocent until the end of
time on the lists, or we attempt to moderate them so that we look more
like a Linux distro than our Off The Wall forum page, we're just never
going to have 100% agreement.  If there were 14 source-based distros
out there we could all pick the one that most aligns with our favorite
communications philosophy, PID 1, and text editor.  Unfortunately
there are barely enough of us to make one distro viable, so we're just
going to have to find something we can all live with before everybody
ends up rage quitting.

FWIW this will not be the first time Gentoo has made the -dev list
more controlled for posting.  Heck, I remember a time when most of the
serious talk happened on #gentoo-dev which I think is STILL dev-only
plus a whitelist.  There are plenty of projects that have completely
closed development lists.

For all the concern of a closed list driving off newcomers, I suspect
that the constant posts about how some kind of cabal runs the distro
behind closed doors is probably more damaging.  From the sound of
things we'll get to continue to listen to it until the end of time on
-project, as the "cabal" seems to get re-elected every year, with a
bit of turnover who oddly enough seem to end up becoming part of the
cabal.  I'd swear that they were being paid off but I'd presume that
from your seat on the board you'd know if that were the case.

Unless...  Could the Trustees be paying the Council to be the bad guys
while they secretly run the show?  Could they be the cabal behind the
cabal?

Well, in any case we're clearly sticking to the bit in the social
contract about not hiding our problems.  They're on full display for
anybody crazy enough to join us.  At least we know the newcomers are
serious about the distro, because I doubt they're just here for the
social life...  :)

-- 
Rich