Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Marek Szuba]

On 2021-06-20 22:40, David Seifert wrote:

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term?

Yes, I do.

> Does your commit activity support this?

I would say it does but in the end it is up to the others to judge.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical
> decision needs to be made. How will you react?

Gather as many technical details about the background and the 
alternatives to be considered as well as the amount of effort (and/or 
cost) required to introduce *and maintain* the alternatives, consider 
the pros and cons, if need be and appropriate to the situation (some 
issues might better be kept within Gentoo after all) discuss the matter 
with an independent party possessing appropriate knowledge, present my 
view to other members of the Council, listen to their respective views, 
vote on the solution I consider best at that point.

> Will you defer? Do you consider abstaining a viable option for the
> group of people making decisions as a last resort?

I think the "last resort" part makes it clear here that under such 
circumstances I have to make a decision. Okay, technically I do not HAVE 
TO make one - but I do not have to be a member of the Gentoo Council 
either. Assuming I am, non-action doesn't seem a sensible option.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you
> performed?

I assume you're talking about Gentoo and not my work in general. Well,
let's see:
  - my turnover rate as far as resolving bugs in or bumping packages is,
I dare say, rather good;
  - I have not only successfully adapted Python eclasses to Lua (which I
continue to insist has not been a big deal, it's the authors of the
former who have done the bulk of the work) but also single-handedly
migrated a large fraction of Lua/LuaJIT revdeps to the new eclasses,
finally - after more than 4 years since it had been proposed - making it
possible for Gentoo ebuilds to use Lua versions other than 5.1 without
bundling;
  - at the time of Gentoo switching the default Python target to 3.8,
most (if not all) of Python revdeps I maintain were already ready for 3.9.
Soooo... yes?

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you
> would try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By
> positive change I mean actually changing something concrete, not some
> diffuse notion of "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible
> deliverable.

As mentioned in my manifest, one thing I would definitely like to keep
an eye on is narrowing the gap between what PMS requires our package
managers to support and features our main tree implicitly relies on.
Call me weird but I quite like the idea of being able to choose one's
favourite Gentoo package manager and the narrower the aforementioned gap
is, the smaller the risk of alternative solutions falling behind
whatever the majority of developers use.

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take
> decisions for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than
> waiting for the decision to be made for it?

Absolutely.

> Would you consider a small number of departing views on the mailing
> list or IRC to be enough to derail a proposal?

Definitely not, in my opinion that would pretty much guarantee us not to
be able to make any significant changes to anything.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been discussed
> enough?

The particulars will depend on the issue at hand but there are several
indicators which, when combined, might indicate this. For instance, if:
  - newer comments essentially repeat the same statements over and over,
  - the discussion focusses more and more on dissecting some specific
minutiae,
  - the frequency of new comments is tailing off (caveat: this might take
a LONG time), and/or
  - growing fraction of ad-hominem attacks, trolling and the like.

-- 
Marecki