Re: Draft of Proposal for the GNOME Foundation.

[kelly poverty bloomington in us]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2000 15:21:22 -0400 (EDT), Joe Shaw <joe@helixcode.com> said:

>>I think it's all a matter of how you state it. Yes, clearly we ought
>>not even try to force unreasonable release dates on a module
>>maintainer. But when you say things like requiring unanimous
>>consent, rather than requiring consensus, or just leaving the issue
>>up to common sense, that sounds to me like it's giving module
>>maintainers a green light to withhold their consent for reasons not
>>directly related to their ability to make a release, for example,
>>maintainer of package gnome-foo says "I don't agree to this release
>>date unless you also include my other package, gnome-bar" or even "I
>>don't agree to this release date unless the maintainer of
>>gnome-frozen will accept my patch of questionable merit".

>That's a good point. Perhaps we should follow someone's suggestion (I
>don't remember who right now) of just not stating this explicitly in
>the bylaws at all. It's the way things have always been and things
>will probably always be that way.

The advantage of explicitly setting out a policy and a conflict
resolution procedure is that, when conflicts arise (and they WILL
arise, they always do), there will be a means for settling them other
than yelling at each other until one side gives up.

Leaving it to "consensus" is probably ok most of the time, but then
what happens when no consensus can be reached?  Also, a consensus of
who?  Who is part of this deliberation process?

Kelly