[aur-general] Special Removal of an Inactive TU: speps

[Thorsten Toepper]

On 18.01.2018 02:11, Eli Schwartz via aur-general wrote:
> On 01/17/2018 06:18 PM, Thorsten Toepper wrote:
>> I'm no longer a TU so I can't see how active both speps and faidoc have
>> been regarding participation in the votes. Yet the TU-Bylaws are pretty
>> strict and given that Bluewind/Florian pointed out during the discussion
>> period that both TUs had participated in proposal 99 that started on
>> December 18 2017 which is in my TZ now exactly one month ago. Therefore
>> the second requirement, to NOT do any special action on the AUR
>> requiring TU privileges is not fulfilled, as participating in votes is
>> exactly one of these TU privileges. Also the alternative option with
>> inactivity due to non-participation in votes has been invalidated by
>> this participation. Unless of course there have been six such votes
>> before, again I can't see that nor if they themselves participated in
>> the votes for proposal 100 and 101.
> 
> "as participating in votes is exactly one of these TU privileges"
> 
> This does seem to be unclear in the Bylaws. As someone mentioned on IRC:
>> In my mind aurweb just happens to be a convenient place for the vote
>> functionality to be located, but isn't actually part of the AUR.
> 
> Does voting, an action which doesn't seem to have a lot to do with
> *being* a TU, merely deciding who should be allowed to do so, and is
> more or less invisible to the community, constitute a "TU privilege" on
> the AUR?
> 
> Looking at the context of previous amendment discussions, it seems like
> the Special Removal was motivated by the desire to remove TUs who
> 
> EITHER
> block quorum by failing to vote,
> 
> OR
> fail to enhance the AUR as TUs are intended to do, by such qualifying
> actions as:
> - elevating packages to [community]
> - contributing to the AUR as a good example
> - moderating the package list or users
> - participated in general discussion about the AUR on this list
> 
> To that end, as bgyorgy said, the "Arch User Repository" would be "that
> which the regular users interact with to upload package recipes", and
> totally unrelated to an administrative voting interface which is only
> implemented in aurweb (not the AUR) insomuch as it would be bloat to
> host it separately.
> 

First of all: Congratulations for becoming a TU, you should have applied
sooner so I could've given you my "yes". :-)

As I just wrote in the other mail and as we all seem to agree the social
management is also an important task a TU needs to do. As you say, the
historic background was the problem that TUs being active in the formal
part of being a TU by actively contributing to package management, but
ignoring the social part could not be actively "motivated" so it was
necessary to redefine the rules for reaching a valid quorum and getting
rid of people not taking the social part serious.

Whether the votes happens in the AUR web interface or on a separate
private mailing list is unimportant for the real process I agree, just
at the moment it's the AUR webinterface and the second point is simply
not too well formulated, in it's current form this also includes the
votes and therefore in case someone participated in a vote both blocks
are neglected. So the "either" "or" doesn't really work here.

Rephrasing the bylaw to something like

"performed any action that required TU privileges on the AUR
(*excluding* participation in votes for there is below rule)"

would solve the problem, that TUs may only act in the absolute
background of participation votes, yet not taking care of any binary
packages or AUR package management any more.

As I wrote in the other mail I fully support Gjörgy's action to check
all TUs and initiate votes, it's just that the rule that was chosen to
be applied has this loophole with the participation in votes. And it
should be considered to fix this.

Two TUs initiating the "normal" process based solely on arguments
would've also been fine.

Cheers,
Thorsten

PS: Sorry in case there are too many words missing in sentences, as I'm
very tired I only proof-read once so I most likely missed several occasions.

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