Hi,

I pondered a bit about that old subthread about infrastructure teams the
other day... what follows is what I was intending to post to debian-vote.
But I'll post it to debian-project first, hoping that people improve it
before we get to the stage where everyone posts GPG-signed messages :)

-----

This originates from this debian-project mailing list discussion
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/06/msg00020.html

Proposed general resolution - Project infrastructure team procedures

Debian developers acknowledge the following:
* The Debian Project infrastructure is run by people who volunteer their
time and knowledge in a good-faith effort to help the Debian Project.
* Infrastructure...

On 16/10/07 at 01:20 +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:

On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, Josip Rodin wrote:

Good initiative. You might take some inspiration in the "Team guidelines"
that I drafted earlier this year:
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Guidelines

Yeah, although in practice it's a mix of "people reply to help request"
and "people spontaneously volunteer and ask what they can do to help".
Maybe you can make that clearer.

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 06:31:30AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

Yes. They should all have a mechanism to stop them from calcifying.

[will check the wiki page, but I deleted the quote by mistake :)]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 09:13:38AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:

That's simply for later calculation of how much they have to repopulate :)

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 09:28:30AM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:

I don't see Lucas' proposal as ad-hoc.

Once we have resolved something as he propose the DPL will be empowered
to solve the problem with any team in the present and in the future. A
big part of our current problem is that some team do not feel they are
under the authority of the DPL whereas IMO the should be.

Indeed reading the first part of your proposal (btw, thanks for that!) I
was expecting a second part precisely on the lines of Lucas' POV. What I
had in mind is something like: the developer body resolves that whatever
team is under the authority of the DPL.

Cheers.

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 01:34:15PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

Sorry, but that won't work. The Constitution already empowers the DPL to do
things that nobody else is explicitly in charge of, yet none of them ever
did anything substantial to e.g. bop DSA to be more active. If we explicate
that ability of theirs, that won't necessarily make them more efficient,
or at least I don't see any proof for that.

This argument is a red herring, but an apparently successful one.
Well, at least my proposal resolves as the first matter of business
that the DPL decides whether a team is governed by these rules, and
the set of rules is then resolved by the developers.

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 09:13:38AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:

Okay, my proposal was aimed primarily at the process of composition, these
guidelines go further and advise about communication and documentation.
The first matter to consider is - whether these two things are as important
at this point as the composition is, sufficient to be part of general
resolution; and if so, which parts :)

I'm thinking that if we extend beyond composition, the GR will become too
long and intricate, with more possibly contentious issues. But, one general
resolution point could be made about the rest:

* With regard to communication and documentation, infrastructure teams
should try to work under the guidelines laid out in
the Debian Developer's Reference.

The DR sounds like a good place to refer to - wiki.d.o inherently can't be
a stable reference, unless we protect the page :) but even then, devref has
BTS support where issues can be hashed out, whereas a wiki page doesn't
(at this time at least).

On 16/10/07 at 09:28 +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:

I really don't think that the qa group, the webwml group, the list
admins, etc need such bureaucracy ... According to your definition, your
proposal apply to them too (they have a unix group, and have access to
resources in ways other than the standard practice).

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 02:29:08PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

Well, let's put it this way - do you think that the hordes of people anxious
to see changes in the design of the web site think that we should keep the
webwml group as it is? :)