Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 11:40:36PM +0200, David Seifert wrote:
> Nominees,
> congratulations on your nominations! As part of this year's elections,
> I'd like to pose five questions to the nominees, that I believe are
> important factors in considering someone a good candidate for the
> council:
 
 Hi David, 

 thanks much for your questions. i will do my best to answer them.

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity support
> this? If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings
> and finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as
> a council member)?
 
 Yes, I have the time for this role. I maintain and
 co-maintain many packages in the tree, so I believe my commit record
 supports this.
 The only thing I haven't done yet from last term is upload the last
 meeting log and summary. This will be done this week since I was on
 vacation last week.

> 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? Will you defer? Do you consider
> abstaining a viable option for the group of people making decisions as a
> last resort?
 
First, I would research the issue and attempt to understand what the
differences are.  Once I understood the differences, I
would want to understand why they are irreconcilable. I believe that
ultimately if a decision is brought to the council and that decision
can't be made by the affected parties, it is the council's
responsibility to make the decision.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?
 
 I feel like i have performed pretty well.

> 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.
 
 I want to get the usr merge done in Gentoo this time around. The
 primary thing stopping that is we still don't have a way to migrate
 live systems, but I will put in the work on that.

Another project I'm interested in is a tool that will do automatic
stabilizations.

> 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?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I'll take this to mean "should the
council start making decisions about the distro proactively and
directing projects or developers to follow those decisions?"

In the past, the council has been seen as a dispute resolutions body
more than a leadership body; it doesn't get involved much unless the
community asks it to.

I am open to the council taking a stronger leadership role, but we need
to remember too that we are all volunteers, so people can only work on
things they have time to work on.

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

I would need to understand the details of the departing views to make
this decision.

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

If no new points are being brought up in regard to the view and we are
continually re-hashing the same points.

Thanks,

William