Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2019-07-21

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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On Sun, 2019-07-07 at 21:30 +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> In two weeks from now, the newly elected Council will have its
> constituent meeting. This is the time to raise and prepare items that
> the Council should put on the agenda to discuss or vote on.
> 
> Please respond to this message with agenda items. Do not hesitate to
> repeat your agenda item here with a pointer if you previously
> suggested one (since the last meeting).
> 

My second agenda item is: removing posting restrictions from gentoo-dev
mailing list.

I was on the Council that made those changes, and from retrospective I
believe the decision to be a mistake.  It was made to workaround
a problem with inefficiency of ComRel, and we should have focused
on fixing ComRel instead.  I don't believe it serves its purpose well
and IMO it causes more problems than it solves.

Notably:

1. People (including developers) workaround it via posting to -project. 
As a result, the correct split on topic of those two mailing lists is
disturbed.

2. The majority of 'blocked' -dev posters are helpful *users*.  We ought
not to put unnecessary obstacles because of few harmful entities.

3. Some processes, in particular ebuild, user/group addition review etc.
require posting to -dev.  This makes it unnecessarily painful to proxied
maintainers who need to request adding it.

4. In fact, I ended up as top committer to whitelist repo, and that's
because I've been adding proxied maintainers to it.  The sole fact that
so few people are being added shows that people resign from posting
rather than request being added.

All that considered, I don't that the whitelist approach works.  It
only:

a. discourages helpful people from posting,

b. adds unnecessary work on developers who have to update the list,

c. breaks list topic separation.

Therefore, I would like to request the Council to vote on removing
the whitelist and reopening the list to public posting.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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