[gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Decision on recent developer retirements

[gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Decision on recent developer retirements

[Thomas Anderson]

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On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 08:11:41PM -0400, Mark Loeser wrote:
> We've made a decision on the appeals of the mandatory retirements of
> Stephen Bennet (spb), Richard Brown (rbrown), and Wulf Krueger
> (philantrop) from Gentoo. To help you understand our decision, here is
> the framework we used for it:
> 
> Unless given compelling reason to believe otherwise, we accept the
> original decision. With that in mind, we considered whether we had
> compelling reason that someone should not be retired and the decision
> should be reversed. One example of a compelling reason for reversing
> this decision would be a clear change in attitude since being retired.
> As part of this review, we went through all of the logs and other
> documentation that was used as evidence for the mandatory retirements.
> We greatly value devrel's judgment, because they are the experts on this
> type of matter and we are just overseeing them.
> 
> With that in mind, we have unanimously decided to let the previous
> decision by devrel stand in all three cases.  All of the appeals have
> been rejected.
> 
> We wanted to ensure that all of them would hear about this privately and
> directly from us rather than from someone else, so we've waited an
> additional 2 weeks since notifying them about our decision.
> 
> Should the retired developers so desire, they are welcome to continue
> participating in and contributing to Gentoo as any other user would, so
> long as they abide by the CoC as it is enforced by userrel. It is at devrel's
> discretion whether to accept a new developer application at any point in
> the future.
> 
> Thank you all for your patience while we came to our decision,
> 
> Mark, on behalf of the Gentoo council
> 
> -- 
> Mark Loeser
> email         -   halcy0n AT gentoo DOT org
> email         -   mark AT halcy0n DOT com
> web           -   http://www.halcy0n.com

Let me see if I understand the council's reasoning...

If dev A gets retired by devrel for insufficient reasons(what those
reasons are are irrelevant to this discussion), and his behaviour does
not change after his retirement(as he never had wrong behaviour), then
dev A's appeal is rejected?

Now, some may say that this is the reason Council reviewed the
evidence(did that really happen?). To prove my point, I'd like to ask
the council(and anyone else interested in devrel/council policy)
what reasons it found, looking through the evidence
provided, that any of the three developers were a security risk, I
certainly didn't see any. 

Needless to say, I'm very disappointed in this decision.

Please keep discussion on gentoo-project.


Regards,
Thomas

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[gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-council] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Decision on recent developer retirements

[Thomas Anderson]

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On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 07:39:35AM -0400, Thomas Anderson wrote:
> Let me see if I understand the council's reasoning...
> 
> If dev A gets retired by devrel for insufficient reasons(what those
> reasons are are irrelevant to this discussion), and his behaviour does
> not change after his retirement(as he never had wrong behaviour), then
> dev A's appeal is rejected?
> 
> Now, some may say that this is the reason Council reviewed the
> evidence(did that really happen?). To prove my point, I'd like to ask
> the council(and anyone else interested in devrel/council policy)
> what reasons it found, looking through the evidence
> provided, that any of the three developers were a security risk, I
> certainly didn't see any. 
> 
> Needless to say, I'm very disappointed in this decision.
> 
> Please keep discussion on gentoo-project.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Thomas

To Clear up confusion expressed by at least one person, my Mail wasn't just about
myself being confused about the wording of the announcement email. It
was about my frustration at the Council's decision because their
supposed procedure for appeals didn't happen in this case. In
Philantrop's case at least, his behaviour since the retirement has been
almost perfect(a devrel member even asserted this), yet his appeal was
rejected.

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[gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-council] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Decision on recent developer retirements

[Alec Warner]

On 8/24/08, Thomas Anderson <gentoofan23@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 07:39:35AM -0400, Thomas Anderson wrote:
>> Let me see if I understand the council's reasoning...
>>
>> If dev A gets retired by devrel for insufficient reasons(what those
>> reasons are are irrelevant to this discussion), and his behaviour does
>> not change after his retirement(as he never had wrong behaviour), then
>> dev A's appeal is rejected?
>>
>> Now, some may say that this is the reason Council reviewed the
>> evidence(did that really happen?). To prove my point, I'd like to ask
>> the council(and anyone else interested in devrel/council policy)
>> what reasons it found, looking through the evidence
>> provided, that any of the three developers were a security risk, I
>> certainly didn't see any.
>>
>> Needless to say, I'm very disappointed in this decision.
>>
>> Please keep discussion on gentoo-project.
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Thomas
>
> To Clear up confusion expressed by at least one person, my Mail wasn't just
> about
> myself being confused about the wording of the announcement email. It
> was about my frustration at the Council's decision because their
> supposed procedure for appeals didn't happen in this case. In
> Philantrop's case at least, his behaviour since the retirement has been
> almost perfect(a devrel member even asserted this), yet his appeal was
> rejected.
>

In my not so humble opinion I think they have spent enough time on
this matter already.

I imagine if they were to spend more you will still not be satisfied;
so my question to you is; what do you expect to change?

Do you expect the council to re-review everything and let him back in?
Do you expect the council to modify their processes and if so how?  Do
you have ideas for them to improve?

-Alec

[gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-council] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Decision on recent developer retirements

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 07:39 Sat 23 Aug     , Thomas Anderson wrote:
> Let me see if I understand the council's reasoning...
> 
> If dev A gets retired by devrel for insufficient reasons(what those
> reasons are are irrelevant to this discussion), and his behaviour does
> not change after his retirement(as he never had wrong behaviour), then
> dev A's appeal is rejected?

Let's start at the beginning of what you've said here. First, you claim 
the reasons are insufficient. If the lead of devrel and all 7 council 
members disagree with that, you might want to reset your idea of what 
levels of abuse are acceptable in Gentoo.

Second, we apparently failed to make it clear enough for non-English 
natives exactly how this worked. There are basically 3 possible 
positions to have on anything:

1. Clear belief that an issue should be approved
2. Clear belief that an issue should be denied
3. Ambiguous: based on the observed evidence, it could go either way.

The description of which times we would go with the original decision is 
to explain what happens under scenario 3 above. This applies to not just 
devrel but to any team or person within Gentoo making a decision that 
gets appealed. If there's not a good enough reason (in our judgment) to 
change the original decision, we leave it.

> Now, some may say that this is the reason Council reviewed the
> evidence(did that really happen?). To prove my point, I'd like to ask
> the council(and anyone else interested in devrel/council policy)
> what reasons it found, looking through the evidence
> provided, that any of the three developers were a security risk, I
> certainly didn't see any. 

I found no good reason to reverse any of the decisions. The closest 
thing I saw was some ambiguity, and that is specifically what we decided 
to defer to devrel on as I described above.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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