On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 12:39 AM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
This starts the official discussion period for the addition of rules governing the addition of packages to [community]. As this is essentially a bylaw change, we will use that voting procedure: 5 days discussion, 7 days voting, quorum of 75% required.
Since this is an official discussion period, I'll state my opinions in a (hopefully!) brief form. I've been thinking about the whole thing for quite a while now, evaluating all opposing opinions, and I have made up my mind. Any reply is welcome. I *won't* let the discussion end up in a flame, so don't expect an answer to provocative e-mails. I have seen, on both sides of the fence, a lot of people falling in the quicksands of 'a priori' arguments. I'm trying to address the problem and the solutions I can think of from a rational point of view. My succinct conclusions: . Everybody agreed that we weren't able to find a statistically relevant way to calculate package usage. . Imposing limits, albeit relaxed, on TUs will, in my opinion, demotivate many of them. I'll be the first to feel demotivated. . We are using as a reference the pkgstats results that came from very few days of usage. If we really want to put arbitrary limits, then they should be discussed after *at least* one month of pkgstats running. I already wonder: did results change from when we started the discussion? . Even if we restrict package uploading in some way, this won't mean we'll have solved the resource problem: it will only be postponed. If we reduce package intake by 10% (aka: more than it was proposed) it will only take ~11% more time to hog the server resources again, supposing all packages have the same weight. It was demonstrated that the least used packages are pretty small, though. Not a real solution, imho. . With this vote we don't consider that we are *not* totally independent from Arch, even though we theorically are. As Aaron rightly stated, we also need to consider their opinion about the matter. A TU-only vote does exactly the opposite, until an official proposal comes from them. These are the reasons why I intend to REJECT the proposal. My (hopefully constructive) alternative proposals: . Ask someone who knows well what s/he's taking about (a statistician) if s/he can come up with a way to get better numbers from the means we have, with the constraints we have, then decide how to act. . Work with widely used third-party applications (aurvote, yaourt) to better exploit the mean of voting, and get more useful numbers. . Don't put any hard limits at all, just encourage contructive discussion and communication between TUs themselves, the community and devs. I personally trust all of you TUs and I think that, by better defining what our goals are and how we want our repo to be, we can solve this problem without much hassle. «Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.» -Frances Moore Lappé Corrado Primier