[gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Kristian Fiskerstrand]

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The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
bug is [Bug 677824].

This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
previous thread] as per the council decision.

I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.

References:
[Agenda]
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/5c0c0f5552709aca0154b554b9b451fa

[Bug 677824]
https://bugs.gentoo.org/677824

[which was started in a previous thread]
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/c033187cbbfe8677a5177a0af51af170
-- 
Kristian Fiskerstrand
OpenPGP keyblock reachable at hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net
fpr:94CB AFDD 3034 5109 5618 35AA 0B7F 8B60 E3ED FAE3


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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

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On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 3:06 PM Kristian Fiskerstrand <k_f@gentoo.org> wrote:

> References:
> [Agenda]
>
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/5c0c0f5552709aca0154b554b9b451fa
>
> [Bug 677824]
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/677824
>
> [which was started in a previous thread]
>
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/c033187cbbfe8677a5177a0af51af170
>

 I looked at the links a bit, but there's very little substance there. Does
anyone want to give some more context and background?

Regards,

Dirkjan

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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Kristian Fiskerstrand]

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On 6/4/19 3:15 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>  I looked at the links a bit, but there's very little substance there. Does
> anyone want to give some more context and background?

There are several elements being discussed; but noting, in no particular
order, some of them;

(a) The forums are hosted on Gentoo infra and in the name of the
distribution, but there is a very split user and developer base; are the
forums properly moderated wrt (i) CoC (ii) legal liability / copyrights
(iii) potential PR issues towards the distribution for user contributed
content;

(b) Part of (a) discussion is appeals process, so a user banned from
forums can appeal a ban to other parts (comrel, council), so a decision
with regards to forums also affects other projects / groups within the
distribution. Is the additional overhead worthwhile?

(c) The discussion has mostly focused on OTW (Off-The-Wall) section of
the forums, one argument for keeping it is it is a convenient place for
moderators to move threads that are started in other forums but doesn't
belong there instead of deleting it, and keeping off-topic discussion in
separate threads minimize the noise for the rest of forums.


-- 
Kristian Fiskerstrand
OpenPGP keyblock reachable at hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net
fpr:94CB AFDD 3034 5109 5618 35AA 0B7F 8B60 E3ED FAE3


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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[desultory]

On 06/04/19 09:30, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> On 6/4/19 3:15 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>>  I looked at the links a bit, but there's very little substance there. Does
>> anyone want to give some more context and background?
> 
> There are several elements being discussed; but noting, in no particular
> order, some of them;
> 
> (a) The forums are hosted on Gentoo infra and in the name of the
> distribution, but there is a very split user and developer base; are the
> forums properly moderated wrt (i) CoC (ii) legal liability / copyrights
> (iii) potential PR issues towards the distribution for user contributed
> content;
> 
Since that is a bit of a tangle of claims, allow me to break that down
into addressable components.

> (a) The forums are hosted on Gentoo infra and in the name of the
> distribution,
Yes, the forums are operating on some, but not all, of the hardware
donated for that express purpose.

> but there is a very split user and developer base;
Which is, at least in large part, due to the behavior of some, but by no
means all, developers who actively antagonize users. That there is a
disconnect between one set of users (some developers) and another set of
users (people other than those in the first set) seems a rather curious
thing to place blame for on people who have invested as much time as the
forums team has on attempting to bridge that gap where possible.

> are the forums properly moderated wrt (i) CoC
So far as I have found, the forums are one of the very few places where
the CoC is actually enforced. But, since you brought it up (as a new
claim, mind), do you have any specific complaints, or are you expecting
us to somehow prove that we have not, as a team, ever failed to fully
and properly enforce the CoC according to your standards? If so, that is
an utterly ridiculous standard to meet, especially given that the CoC is
open to interpretation. Not to mention that it would call for us to
prove a negative (which is functionally impossible regardless of
available time), on a few days notice.

> (ii) legal liability / copyrights
Again, this is a new claim and no related problems have been previously
raised. Given the nature of the forums, Gentoo neither holds nor claims
to hold copyright to users posts, so this appears to be ridiculous from
first principles.

> (iii) potential PR issues towards the distribution for user contributed
> content;
>
This is a rather fantastical standard to put to any project: might it,
at some point, potentially, in theory, even indirectly, be related to
something which someone does not like? Allow me to reveal the answer to
that: yes. Someone, somewhere will find something that someone does or
says offensive, no matter how harmless that thing was in context,
because there are people who actively seek even ludicrously convoluted
ways in which to claim offense and that they should be sheltered from
such things because they are too delicate for this world.

Just to drive home the point of how ridiculous this is, by this
standard: The security team should be disbanded because they are too
secretive, no matter that their "secretive" actions are intended to, and
indeed serve to, improve the security of installed systems, they are a
strange frightening cabal and must be stopped. All games must be removed
as there is some aspect of each that someone dislikes, sudoku might
terrify people with math anxiety, tetris could terrify people with fear
of falling objects, and fortune databases even have USE flags to include
"offensive material", this must be stopped. Action must be immediately
undertaken to remove systemd and all support for it, because some people
don't like it. Action must be immediately undertaken to remove openrc
and all support for it, because some people don't like it. Action must
be immediately undertaken to remove chrome, and firefox, and chromium,
and opera, and well, pretty much everything, because, somewhere, someone
doesn't like that particular thing, it is offensive and must be expunged
from existence because that would make the world a better, and utterly
barren, place.

Could we please, pretty please, have some sane standards, even during
lame duck sessions?

> (b) Part of (a) discussion is appeals process, so a user banned from
> forums can appeal a ban to other parts (comrel, council), so a decision
> with regards to forums also affects other projects / groups within the
> distribution. Is the additional overhead worthwhile?
> 
Exactly when was this in question? Are you telling us that it is the
opinion of the council that the forums team has absolute final word on
CoC (and forum guidelines in general) enforcement on the forums? If so,
this would be news to me.

If you have somehow conflated this with proctors "offering" to insert
itself as another layer between forums and ComRel, and my rejection of
that arrangement as a bad idea for all involved, you would be mistaken.

> (c) The discussion has mostly focused on OTW (Off-The-Wall) section of
> the forums, one argument for keeping it is it is a convenient place for
> moderators to move threads that are started in other forums but doesn't
> belong there instead of deleting it, and keeping off-topic discussion in
> separate threads minimize the noise for the rest of forums.
> 
And the argument for removing it has come from people who rarely, if
ever, use the forums at all, by all appearances primarily spurred on by
a developer who publicly admits to maintaining a grudge against the
entire project due to negative feedback (from me) on a bad idea they
proposed quite some time ago (which was not implemented). So on one side
of the argument you have the people actually doing the work who do
consider Off the Wall to have at least sufficient value to continue to
exist, and on the other you have people you by their own admission are
ignorant of the thing in practice and who are therefore operating on the
basis of ignorance, disinformation, and to some extent paranoia.

I will, doubtlessly, have further commentary on the matter, but for now
this about covers what immediately comes to mind.
> 

Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Michał Górny]

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On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 15:05 +0200, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
> discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
> The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
> bug is [Bug 677824].
> 
> This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
> previous thread] as per the council decision.
> 
> I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
> allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.
> 

I don't think OTW is a major problem.  The real problem are *technical*
forums, and those cause two problems.  The first of them is that
developers rarely hear of the problems with their packages.  The second
of them is that Forums tend to breed very bad 'solutions'.

I don't mind providing multiple support channels as long as problems
actually reach developers.  However, I don't think it's news to most of
the developers who don't actively participate in Forums (read: look
for new threads everywhere) that some problems never leave them.

During my years in Gentoo I've been pinged a few times over expansive
Forum threads on problems with my packages which never made it to
Bugzilla or anything else that I actually could've noticed.  It all
relies on courtesy of accidental developers (who are not Forum
moderators, I should add).  I can only imagine how many problems were
never addressed properly because the maintainer never learned of them,
and cheap hacks proposed on Forums were sufficient for the users.

And no, I don't think that requiring every developer to directly follow
all Forum feeds is a solution.

A side effect of the former problem is that Forums are home to many
horrible 'solutions'.  Sadly, those solutions sometimes involve making
things *much worse* than they were before.  This is problem both for
users who end up victims of having their systems broken, and developers
who end up having to help fix the resulting breakage.

Breakage resulting from use of dev-python/pip is the most prominent
example I know of.  Multiple Forum victims ended up using it to 'fix'
problems.  As a result, they ended up with obsolete directly installed
packages overriding Gentoo packages and breaking stuff.  The scale of
this was so great that I had to actually patch dev-python/pip to block
installing packages system-wide.  Which is a technical hack to a social
problem.

I'm not saying Forums is the only source of the problem, people can
figure out how to break systems themselves.  However, Forums is
frequently a source of bad information that is mistakenly trusted
and is not properly verified and rejected.

To summarize, I think the two major problems with the Forums are:
1) not passing information properly to package maintainers,
and 2) lack of proper Q/A.  If you can solve them, I don't have any
problem with the Forums.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Alec Warner]

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On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 8:38 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 15:05 +0200, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> > The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
> > discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
> > The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
> > bug is [Bug 677824].
> >
> > This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
> > previous thread] as per the council decision.
> >
> > I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
> > allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.
> >
>
> I don't think OTW is a major problem.  The real problem are *technical*
> forums, and those cause two problems.  The first of them is that
> developers rarely hear of the problems with their packages.  The second
> of them is that Forums tend to breed very bad 'solutions'.
>

I'm curious how this is different from other support forums. Are there no
bad solutions proposed on the wiki? in #gentoo? In other channels?

-A


>
> I don't mind providing multiple support channels as long as problems
> actually reach developers.  However, I don't think it's news to most of
> the developers who don't actively participate in Forums (read: look
> for new threads everywhere) that some problems never leave them.
>
> During my years in Gentoo I've been pinged a few times over expansive
> Forum threads on problems with my packages which never made it to
> Bugzilla or anything else that I actually could've noticed.  It all
> relies on courtesy of accidental developers (who are not Forum
> moderators, I should add).  I can only imagine how many problems were
> never addressed properly because the maintainer never learned of them,
> and cheap hacks proposed on Forums were sufficient for the users.
>
> And no, I don't think that requiring every developer to directly follow
> all Forum feeds is a solution.
>
> A side effect of the former problem is that Forums are home to many
> horrible 'solutions'.  Sadly, those solutions sometimes involve making
> things *much worse* than they were before.  This is problem both for
> users who end up victims of having their systems broken, and developers
> who end up having to help fix the resulting breakage.
>
> Breakage resulting from use of dev-python/pip is the most prominent
> example I know of.  Multiple Forum victims ended up using it to 'fix'
> problems.  As a result, they ended up with obsolete directly installed
> packages overriding Gentoo packages and breaking stuff.  The scale of
> this was so great that I had to actually patch dev-python/pip to block
> installing packages system-wide.  Which is a technical hack to a social
> problem.
>
> I'm not saying Forums is the only source of the problem, people can
> figure out how to break systems themselves.  However, Forums is
> frequently a source of bad information that is mistakenly trusted
> and is not properly verified and rejected.
>
> To summarize, I think the two major problems with the Forums are:
> 1) not passing information properly to package maintainers,
> and 2) lack of proper Q/A.  If you can solve them, I don't have any
> problem with the Forums.


> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Alec Warner]

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On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 6:30 AM Kristian Fiskerstrand <k_f@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 6/4/19 3:15 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> >  I looked at the links a bit, but there's very little substance there.
> Does
> > anyone want to give some more context and background?
>
> There are several elements being discussed; but noting, in no particular
> order, some of them;
>
> (a) The forums are hosted on Gentoo infra and in the name of the
> distribution, but there is a very split user and developer base; are the
> forums properly moderated wrt (i) CoC (ii) legal liability / copyrights
> (iii) potential PR issues towards the distribution for user contributed
> content;
>

(i) I think you need to convince the existing forum-mods team that the CoC
matters, and that they should actually enforce it. I don't see a very
robust conversation with the existing mods team on this topic. My
impression from forum-mods is that they view this action as a cudgel (to
get rid of / change something most developers dislike) rather than as the
CoC is intended (to encourage a more open and safe Gentoo Community,
presumably.)

(ii) is a Foundation issue, as the Council has no legal liability for the
forums or their content that I am aware of. I (personally as a board
member) am happy with the existing legal liability the forums represents.

(iii) I'm not sure how the forums differ from other UCG Gentoo hosts (wiki,
bugzilla, blogs) or Gentoo affiliated areas (public Gentoo prefixed
Freenode IRC channels.) Are you suggesting we not host UCG, or why would we
limit this action to the Forums? Or you assert that we have sufficient
moderation of the other UCG channels but forums is not sufficiently
moderated?


> (b) Part of (a) discussion is appeals process, so a user banned from
> forums can appeal a ban to other parts (comrel, council), so a decision
> with regards to forums also affects other projects / groups within the
> distribution. Is the additional overhead worthwhile?


I think if you want to root agency in the Council or its delegate that is
fine, but I haven't seen this as a problem in practice. I also don't see
things like "Oh I was banned from #gentoo for 4 weeks" come to comrel very
often, FWIW.


>


> (c) The discussion has mostly focused on OTW (Off-The-Wall) section of
> the forums, one argument for keeping it is it is a convenient place for
> moderators to move threads that are started in other forums but doesn't
> belong there instead of deleting it, and keeping off-topic discussion in
> separate threads minimize the noise for the rest of forums.
>

I'm not sure we have explored this sufficiently, so I'm trying to drive
more discussion here. Why has it focused on OTW?

(i) Because it contains content that violates the CoC?
(ii) Because it contains content unrelated to Gentoo?
(iii) Because it contains content we find objectionable?

I'm trying to narrow down the scope here. Most UCG sites contain (i), and
(ii) and probably (iii). I have concerns that basically no one in the
council even uses the forum, we have no data that describes a problem on
the forum, and we are (as described in the 10/02 meeting log notes[0])
trying to legislate the job of a moderation team that we have essentially
failed to achieve any common ground with.

The other exciting part is that currently the forums are hosted at the
pleasure of the Board on behalf of the community and the board owns the
trademarks and relationship with the sponsor who donates the hardware for
the forums. I want to desperately avoid an outcome where the Council votes
to make changes to the forum, but the board objects to said changes. In
other words; I want to achieve some kind of consensus on how the forums
should be operated.

[0] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20190210.txt


>
> --
> Kristian Fiskerstrand
> OpenPGP keyblock reachable at hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net
> fpr:94CB AFDD 3034 5109 5618 35AA 0B7F 8B60 E3ED FAE3
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 6:04 AM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> (i) I think you need to convince the existing forum-mods team that the CoC matters, and that they should actually enforce it.

Seems like we need to convince the Trustees of this as well...

> I want to desperately avoid an outcome where the Council votes to make changes to the forum, but the board objects to said changes.

Well, that is easy enough.  If there isn't any legal reason to object
to a change, then don't.  If there is, then please speak up before
somebody does something bad.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Michał Górny]

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On Wed, 2019-06-12 at 02:42 -0700, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 8:38 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 15:05 +0200, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> > > The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
> > > discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
> > > The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
> > > bug is [Bug 677824].
> > > 
> > > This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
> > > previous thread] as per the council decision.
> > > 
> > > I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
> > > allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.
> > > 
> > 
> > I don't think OTW is a major problem.  The real problem are *technical*
> > forums, and those cause two problems.  The first of them is that
> > developers rarely hear of the problems with their packages.  The second
> > of them is that Forums tend to breed very bad 'solutions'.
> > 
> 
> I'm curious how this is different from other support forums. Are there no
> bad solutions proposed on the wiki? in #gentoo? In other channels?
> 

I never said this is much different.  However, this topic is about
Forums, so I'm answering what my problem with Forums is so far.  To be
honest, I don't think I've seen any other support channel causing so
much mayhem.

But if I were to consider your question more deeply, then I believe
there are differences:

1) Forums are more 'ad hoc' than Wiki.  I dare say people usually put
more effort to put correct data there than when they answer some forum
post.  Not to mention it's organized by topic, so it's easier to review,
and provides ability to directly correct mistakes.  On Forums, the best
*I* can do (as regular developer) is point out the mistake in a reply
and hope that user reads it before applying a bad idea presented
earlier.

2) #gentoo is not really 'persistent' the way Forums (or Wiki) are.  If
someone gives a bad advice, it usually directly affects only people
being on the channel at the moment.  Even if the same bad advice is
given multiple times or spread, I doubt it would reach the scope of
Forum post that's publicly visible to everyone forever.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 8:16 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> But if I were to consider your question more deeply, then I believe
> there are differences:
>
> 1) ...On Forums, the best
> *I* can do (as regular developer) is point out the mistake in a reply
> and hope that user reads it before applying a bad idea presented
> earlier.

I think the -user list suffers from some of the same issue.

These sorts of forums can seem "democratic" but often I see 12 people
going on and on about a really bad solution, and some dev can point
out the right solution, and often the other 12 just ignore it and keep
going on about the bad solution.  So, everybody gets an equal vote and
competency tends to get drowned out.

If anything the forums are a little better in this regard in that the
devs at least get more obvious flair.  There is also the potential for
moderation to deal with this but in practice I don't think we're doing
that.  Some kind of "approved answers" feature might create more value
in the forums.

Really though I think users also have to accept responsibility to some
degree.  If you go with the popular vote and ignore the minority voice
that happens to have a dev flair or an @g.o email you're probably
going to have issues.  I don't think devs need to feel obligated to
offer paths forward for whatever breakage users create by following
bad advice.

And of course we have the issue that most devs don't have time to
handhold everybody, and part of the cost of accepting free help with
support is that you are going to have varying levels of expertise.

Personally I don't have an issue with having Forums - I think they're
a mode of communication that has certain advantages as well as
disadvantages.  My issue is more with the fact that we are tending to
get some kind of schism in the community along with them, in part
because there isn't universal agreement around certain values (not
just the CoC though that is part of it).

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Alec Warner]

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On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:13 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 6:04 AM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > (i) I think you need to convince the existing forum-mods team that the
> CoC matters, and that they should actually enforce it.
>
> Seems like we need to convince the Trustees of this as well...
>

2 quick points then.

(a) I believe that the CoC is a tool to achieve a goal. The goal is to
apply a policy to have a community where people feel its safe to
contribute. That means safe from harassment, where contributors feel free
to speak their mind without being set upon. So when the CoC achieves this
goal, its good; when it doesn't achieve this goal, its bad. That is why I
think Gentoo needs a CoC; there is no intrinsic value in a CoC itself.
Instead the value comes from the community using it to hold its members
accountable to achieve the underlying goal.

(b) I am but one human, the board is 5 humans, the council is 7 humans. I
don't believe any of us use the forums and none of us are forums-mods. The
people who *currently* today apply the CoC in the forums are the forums
mods and they typically move the bad stuff to OTW. We need the support of
moderators in whatever decision we make. Either we get consensus from the
current moderator team, or we fire them and hire new moderators who will
enforce whatever unilateral decision we make. I'm suggesting that the
former (where we convince them our decision is correct and they should
enforce it) is better than firing everyone and hiring new mods.


>
> > I want to desperately avoid an outcome where the Council votes to make
> changes to the forum, but the board objects to said changes.
>
> Well, that is easy enough.  If there isn't any legal reason to object
> to a change, then don't.  If there is, then please speak up before
> somebody does something bad.
>

I'm not convinced my duty as a trustee ends at legal. The *community* has
no representation on the Council at all (users don't get to vote) and so I
struggle to see how the *community* is represented.

"Gentoo lives for the community, by the community

Gentoo strives to please its users. The Gentoo community is Gentoo's goal
of life. Without community there is no Gentoo. To help Gentoo's
development, the community provides a continuous stream of feedback and
contributes to the various aspects of the Gentoo distribution. This
cooperative model will remain valid for Gentoo's entire lifespan."[0]

If we strive to please our users, I struggling to see why we would remove
the entire forum (as was hinted at earlier.)

[0]
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Main_Page#Gentoo_lives_for_the_community.2C_by_the_community


> --
> Rich
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Jimi Huotari]

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On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 05:38:30 +0200
Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 15:05 +0200, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> > The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
> > discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
> > The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
> > bug is [Bug 677824].
> > 
> > This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
> > previous thread] as per the council decision.
> > 
> > I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
> > allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.
> >   
> 
> I don't think OTW is a major problem.  The real problem are *technical*
> forums, and those cause two problems.  The first of them is that
> developers rarely hear of the problems with their packages.  The second
> of them is that Forums tend to breed very bad 'solutions'.
> 
> I don't mind providing multiple support channels as long as problems
> actually reach developers.  However, I don't think it's news to most of
> the developers who don't actively participate in Forums (read: look
> for new threads everywhere) that some problems never leave them.
> 
> During my years in Gentoo I've been pinged a few times over expansive
> Forum threads on problems with my packages which never made it to
> Bugzilla or anything else that I actually could've noticed.  It all
> relies on courtesy of accidental developers (who are not Forum
> moderators, I should add).  I can only imagine how many problems were
> never addressed properly because the maintainer never learned of them,
> and cheap hacks proposed on Forums were sufficient for the users.

It would be nice to have some actual examples of these issues.

I have been browsing the forums since 2010 as a user, and since 2015
as a moderator, and what /I/ tend to see, is people encouraging
others\r to file bug reports [1][2][3][4][5] whenever it seems to be a
good\r idea.  I wonder how many bugs would /not/ have been brought to
the\r attention of developers without the forums.  :]

I dare say the forums often save developer time by quite a lot,
too, when the issue at hand would be resolved as INVALID
for example, which might additionally leave the user frustrated
and without any idea towards how to fix things [6].

Ultimately, it's up to the user of course, just like it would be
without the forums.

> A side effect of the former problem is that Forums are home to many
> horrible 'solutions'.  Sadly, those solutions sometimes involve making
> things *much worse* than they were before.  This is problem both for
> users who end up victims of having their systems broken, and developers
> who end up having to help fix the resulting breakage.
> 
> Breakage resulting from use of dev-python/pip is the most prominent
> example I know of.  Multiple Forum victims ended up using it to 'fix'
> problems.  As a result, they ended up with obsolete directly installed
> packages overriding Gentoo packages and breaking stuff.  The scale of
> this was so great that I had to actually patch dev-python/pip to block
> installing packages system-wide.  Which is a technical hack to a social
> problem.

When I think of 'pip' and the forums, all I can think of, is users
asking others /not/ to install things as root with it
[7][8][9][10][11].  I suspect this issue has more to do with 'pip'
itself, and the guides/documentation regarding it in the wild.

> I'm not saying Forums is the only source of the problem, people can
> figure out how to break systems themselves.  However, Forums is
> frequently a source of bad information that is mistakenly trusted
> and is not properly verified and rejected.
> 
> To summarize, I think the two major problems with the Forums are:
> 1) not passing information properly to package maintainers,
> and 2) lack of proper Q/A.  If you can solve them, I don't have any
> problem with the Forums.

For 1), perhaps we could create scripts that will scan all the forum
forum posts that are being created, and, when a package name is
matched, will send copies of the posts via mail to the maintainers
of said packages that are being discussed, and perhaps automatically
files bug reports for them as well, why not.

For 2), have all the posts go via the Gentoo Quality Assurance
Project, before they hit the forums?

There may be some jest within the preceding suggestions, but I
don't quite see how you'd expect these things to be fixed (that
is not to say that I agree them being problems that are in need
of a fix).

It's a community helping out the community, and if it has been
a great burden on developers, I don't remember having heard or
read of it before now.

0. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-826842.html
1. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-189786.html#189786
2. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3341931.html#3341931
3. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8030732.html#8030732
4. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7143726.html#7143726
5. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8233138.html#8233138
6. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1073732.html
7. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7497450.html#7497450
8. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8109926.html#8109926
9. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7901776.html#7901776
10. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7665482.html#7665482
11. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8226884.html#8226884

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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 9:00 AM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:13 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>
> (a) I believe that the CoC is a tool to achieve a goal. The goal is to apply a policy to have a community where people feel its safe to contribute.

Also to have a community where people feel like they actually WANT to
contribute.

Why would I want to be a part of an organization that is constantly
slinging mud on the mailing lists?  Why would I even want to read
these lists?

Ultimately the many volunteers who give their time to Gentoo deserve
to have a place where they can do it in reasonable harmony.  Some
disagreement is inevitable and just a direct result of our mission.
However, there are many disagreements that could come up that have
nothing to do with our mission, and part of the reason for the CoC is
so that people understand that this just isn't the place to discuss
those other things.

>>
>> Well, that is easy enough.  If there isn't any legal reason to object
>> to a change, then don't.  If there is, then please speak up before
>> somebody does something bad.
>
>
> I'm not convinced my duty as a trustee ends at legal. The *community* has no representation on the Council at all (users don't get to vote) and so I struggle to see how the *community* is represented.

So, first, you don't have to have a vote to be represented by somebody.

And, second, anybody in the community has the opportunity to vote by
contributing.

Not every voice is equally important to listen to, and the ones
casting the votes are arguably the voice that are most worth listening
to.

> To help Gentoo's development, the community provides a continuous stream of feedback and contributes to the various aspects of the Gentoo distribution.

Indeed, and all those who do contribute in this way already get to
vote for Council, and if somebody feels they have been missed they
should apply for dev status so that this can be fixed.

In any case, the job of the Trustees is to facilitate Gentoo's
mission, not interfere with those chosen to lead it...

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Alec Warner]

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On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 7:09 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 9:00 AM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:13 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>
> >
> > (a) I believe that the CoC is a tool to achieve a goal. The goal is to
> apply a policy to have a community where people feel its safe to contribute.
>
> Also to have a community where people feel like they actually WANT to
> contribute.
>
> Why would I want to be a part of an organization that is constantly
> slinging mud on the mailing lists?  Why would I even want to read
> these lists?
>
> Ultimately the many volunteers who give their time to Gentoo deserve
> to have a place where they can do it in reasonable harmony.  Some
> disagreement is inevitable and just a direct result of our mission.
> However, there are many disagreements that could come up that have
> nothing to do with our mission, and part of the reason for the CoC is
> so that people understand that this just isn't the place to discuss
> those other things.
>
> >>
> >> Well, that is easy enough.  If there isn't any legal reason to object
> >> to a change, then don't.  If there is, then please speak up before
> >> somebody does something bad.
> >
> >
> > I'm not convinced my duty as a trustee ends at legal. The *community*
> has no representation on the Council at all (users don't get to vote) and
> so I struggle to see how the *community* is represented.
>
> So, first, you don't have to have a vote to be represented by somebody.


> And, second, anybody in the community has the opportunity to vote by
> contributing.


> Not every voice is equally important to listen to, and the ones
> casting the votes are arguably the voice that are most worth listening
> to.




> > To help Gentoo's development, the community provides a continuous stream
> of feedback and contributes to the various aspects of the Gentoo
> distribution.
>
> Indeed, and all those who do contribute in this way already get to
> vote for Council, and if somebody feels they have been missed they
> should apply for dev status so that this can be fixed.
>
> In any case, the job of the Trustees is to facilitate Gentoo's
> mission, not interfere with those chosen to lead it...


So just to keep your IRC commentary on the ML record, you believe the
Foundation should be run such that the board approves any council action
provided its legal; whether or not the board believes the action
facilitates Gentoo's mission, because in your words "anything else leads to
endless infighting between the two groups."

We could update the mission to reflect this mode of operation; feel free to
propose an amendment or run for the board. Its not what I perceive the
mission of the board to be though.

-A


> --
> Rich
>
>

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[gentoo-project] Re: Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Kristian Fiskerstrand]

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On 6/4/19 3:05 PM, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
> discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
> The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
> bug is [Bug 677824].
> 
> This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
> previous thread] as per the council decision.
> 
> I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
> allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.

It seems this matter has sparked a bit of debate across the board, but I
notice several discussions on the matter in various IRC channels that
aren't necessarily followed by relevant parties. I would therefore
encourage those having views on the matter to participate in the
discussion in the mailing list archives to ensure it is being collected
and archived before a decision is made by the Council.

-- 
Kristian Fiskerstrand
OpenPGP keyblock reachable at hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net
fpr:94CB AFDD 3034 5109 5618 35AA 0B7F 8B60 E3ED FAE3


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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[desultory]

On 06/12/19 22:36, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 7:09 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 9:00 AM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:13 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>> (a) I believe that the CoC is a tool to achieve a goal. The goal is to
>> apply a policy to have a community where people feel its safe to contribute.
>>
>> Also to have a community where people feel like they actually WANT to
>> contribute.
>>
>> Why would I want to be a part of an organization that is constantly
>> slinging mud on the mailing lists?  Why would I even want to read
>> these lists?
>>
>> Ultimately the many volunteers who give their time to Gentoo deserve
>> to have a place where they can do it in reasonable harmony.  Some
>> disagreement is inevitable and just a direct result of our mission.
>> However, there are many disagreements that could come up that have
>> nothing to do with our mission, and part of the reason for the CoC is
>> so that people understand that this just isn't the place to discuss
>> those other things.
>>
>>>>
>>>> Well, that is easy enough.  If there isn't any legal reason to object
>>>> to a change, then don't.  If there is, then please speak up before
>>>> somebody does something bad.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not convinced my duty as a trustee ends at legal. The *community*
>> has no representation on the Council at all (users don't get to vote) and
>> so I struggle to see how the *community* is represented.
>>
>> So, first, you don't have to have a vote to be represented by somebody.
> 
> 
>> And, second, anybody in the community has the opportunity to vote by
>> contributing.
> 
> 
>> Not every voice is equally important to listen to, and the ones
>> casting the votes are arguably the voice that are most worth listening
>> to.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>>> To help Gentoo's development, the community provides a continuous stream
>> of feedback and contributes to the various aspects of the Gentoo
>> distribution.
>>
>> Indeed, and all those who do contribute in this way already get to
>> vote for Council, and if somebody feels they have been missed they
>> should apply for dev status so that this can be fixed.
>>
>> In any case, the job of the Trustees is to facilitate Gentoo's
>> mission, not interfere with those chosen to lead it...
> 
> 
> So just to keep your IRC commentary on the ML record, you believe the
> Foundation should be run such that the board approves any council action
> provided its legal; whether or not the board believes the action
> facilitates Gentoo's mission, because in your words "anything else leads to
> endless infighting between the two groups."
> 
> We could update the mission to reflect this mode of operation; feel free to
> propose an amendment or run for the board. Its not what I perceive the
> mission of the board to be though.
> 
Since conversations from IRC are being pulled in, one point that you
mentioned in our recent discussion was that, at least by your
impression, some (unspecified) members of the council were actively
seeking to cause the council and trustees to vote in opposition to one
another. Given that, I have a question for you and for such council members.

Which council members appear to you to be attempting to cause a schism
between the council and foundation?

To all such council members: what benefit would there be in such a scenario?

> -A
> 
> 
>> --
>> Rich
>>
>>
> 

Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 11:53 PM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On 06/12/19 22:36, Alec Warner wrote:
>
> >> A bunch of untrimmed quoted stuff irrelevant to his reply (some of which was already drifting offtopic).
> >
> > A bunch of stuff putting words into other people's mouths which had nothing to do with the topic.
>
> Since conversations from IRC are being pulled in, one point that you
> mentioned in our recent discussion was that, at least by your
> impression, some (unspecified) members of the council were actively
> seeking to cause the council and trustees to vote in opposition to one
> another.

Can we stick to the topic of this thread, which is what if anything to
do with the forums?

If you want to start yet another metastructure debate just start
another thread.  We already have half a dozen such threads starting
due to the upcoming election, which makes this debate actually
somewhat timely, and one is somewhat tangentially related to your
question.  We don't need to take over every other discussion on the
lists with it.

And while we're at it, can we just let people state their own opinions
if they care to?  I realize everybody around here feels deprived if I
don't weigh in on every single thread, but it isn't necessary to
paraphrase from the book of rich0 when for some reason he is
neglecting his no-doubt-numerous disciples on a thread that isn't
directly related to what is being cited...  I mean, historically it
hasn't been THAT hard to flame-bait me into responding to stuff...

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Michael Everitt]

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On 15/06/19 12:17, Rich Freeman wrote:
> And while we're at it, can we just let people state their own opinions
> if they care to?  I realize everybody around here feels deprived if I
> don't weigh in on every single thread, but it isn't necessary to
> paraphrase from the book of rich0 when for some reason he is
> neglecting his no-doubt-numerous disciples on a thread that isn't
> directly related to what is being cited...  I mean, historically it
> hasn't been THAT hard to flame-bait me into responding to stuff...
>
.. you mean there is an entry barrier at all ?! I thought you were The
Other ML troll .. ;) [albeit with a commit bit]


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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Raymond Jennings]

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On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 8:53 PM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 06/12/19 22:36, Alec Warner wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 7:09 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 9:00 AM Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:13 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> (a) I believe that the CoC is a tool to achieve a goal. The goal is to
> >> apply a policy to have a community where people feel its safe to
> contribute.
> >>
> >> Also to have a community where people feel like they actually WANT to
> >> contribute.
> >>
> >> Why would I want to be a part of an organization that is constantly
> >> slinging mud on the mailing lists?  Why would I even want to read
> >> these lists?
> >>
> >> Ultimately the many volunteers who give their time to Gentoo deserve
> >> to have a place where they can do it in reasonable harmony.  Some
> >> disagreement is inevitable and just a direct result of our mission.
> >> However, there are many disagreements that could come up that have
> >> nothing to do with our mission, and part of the reason for the CoC is
> >> so that people understand that this just isn't the place to discuss
> >> those other things.
> >>
> >>>>
> >>>> Well, that is easy enough.  If there isn't any legal reason to object
> >>>> to a change, then don't.  If there is, then please speak up before
> >>>> somebody does something bad.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I'm not convinced my duty as a trustee ends at legal. The *community*
> >> has no representation on the Council at all (users don't get to vote)
> and
> >> so I struggle to see how the *community* is represented.
> >>
> >> So, first, you don't have to have a vote to be represented by somebody.
> >
> >
> >> And, second, anybody in the community has the opportunity to vote by
> >> contributing.
> >
> >
> >> Not every voice is equally important to listen to, and the ones
> >> casting the votes are arguably the voice that are most worth listening
> >> to.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >>> To help Gentoo's development, the community provides a continuous
> stream
> >> of feedback and contributes to the various aspects of the Gentoo
> >> distribution.
> >>
> >> Indeed, and all those who do contribute in this way already get to
> >> vote for Council, and if somebody feels they have been missed they
> >> should apply for dev status so that this can be fixed.
> >>
> >> In any case, the job of the Trustees is to facilitate Gentoo's
> >> mission, not interfere with those chosen to lead it...
> >
> >
> > So just to keep your IRC commentary on the ML record, you believe the
> > Foundation should be run such that the board approves any council action
> > provided its legal; whether or not the board believes the action
> > facilitates Gentoo's mission, because in your words "anything else leads
> to
> > endless infighting between the two groups."
> >
> > We could update the mission to reflect this mode of operation; feel free
> to
> > propose an amendment or run for the board. Its not what I perceive the
> > mission of the board to be though.
> >
> Since conversations from IRC are being pulled in, one point that you
> mentioned in our recent discussion was that, at least by your
> impression, some (unspecified) members of the council were actively
> seeking to cause the council and trustees to vote in opposition to one
> another. Given that, I have a question for you and for such council
> members.
>
> Which council members appear to you to be attempting to cause a schism
> between the council and foundation?
>

My personal point of view is that while council and trustees have different
roles and should presumably focus on the respective responsibilities for
those roles, and avoid stepping on each other's toes, I think it should
also be born in mind that both of them exist for the service of the Gentoo
distro.  The council oversees cross-project issues and the trustees look
after the foundation as stewards of its assets that are used, per its own
paperwork, in support of its mission to support the distro.

By analogy, a foot ball team has wide receivers, quarterbacks, and so on.
Each of them has a different role to play, but they all part of the same
team.  I see council and trustees likewise, and though they may have
distinct roles to play in the distro, both of them are allies because they
serve the same cause.


> To all such council members: what benefit would there be in such a
> scenario?
>
> > -A
> >
> >
> >> --
> >> Rich
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>

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Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[desultory]

On 06/15/19 07:17, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 11:53 PM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/12/19 22:36, Alec Warner wrote:
>>
>>>> A bunch of untrimmed quoted stuff irrelevant to his reply (some of which was already drifting offtopic).
>>>
>>> A bunch of stuff putting words into other people's mouths which had nothing to do with the topic.
>>
>> Since conversations from IRC are being pulled in, one point that you
>> mentioned in our recent discussion was that, at least by your
>> impression, some (unspecified) members of the council were actively
>> seeking to cause the council and trustees to vote in opposition to one
>> another.
> 
> Can we stick to the topic of this thread, which is what if anything to
> do with the forums?
> 
Given where I posted the questions, it seemed obvious to me that they
were in regards to issues raised during a conversation specifically
regarding the topic at hand. Despite your protestation, it still seems
obvious to me.

> If you want to start yet another metastructure debate just start
> another thread.  We already have half a dozen such threads starting
> due to the upcoming election, which makes this debate actually
> somewhat timely, and one is somewhat tangentially related to your
> question.  We don't need to take over every other discussion on the
> lists with it.
> 
I had two very specific questions, both of which are likely to yield
response of limited scope if simply answered instead of responded to
with yet another display of bathos. All I am asking of council members
who specifically seek divergent votes by the council and trustees, if
such parties in their own estimation exist, is to tell us of what
benefit they would see in divergent votes by the council and trustees.
Outside of that group of council members which where addressed as an
unconfirmed theoretical entity, the only other party I was inquiring
with was antarus. So the scope of my posted inquires was neither broad
in scope nor in the set of those from which responses were sought.

If necessary, the question could again be raised generally for all those
running, but that would not necessarily address the views of sitting
council members, which was the specific scope of my present inquiry.

> And while we're at it, can we just let people state their own opinions
> if they care to?  I realize everybody around here feels deprived if I
> don't weigh in on every single thread, but it isn't necessary to
> paraphrase from the book of rich0 when for some reason he is
> neglecting his no-doubt-numerous disciples on a thread that isn't
> directly related to what is being cited...  I mean, historically it
> hasn't been THAT hard to flame-bait me into responding to stuff...
> 
Given that you are not presently on the council, it seems rather
unlikely that you would be a present council member actively seeking
divergent votes from the council and trustees. Further, making earnest
inquires hardly seeks to qualify as deliberate flame bait, especially
not baiting you when you are expressly not one of the parties whose
opinion was sought. So, like, chill and stuff.

Re: [gentoo-project] Various IRC Discussions (was Deferred decision: Forums)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 12:52 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On 06/15/19 07:17, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
> > And while we're at it, can we just let people state their own opinions
> > if they care to?  I realize everybody around here feels deprived if I
> > don't weigh in on every single thread, but it isn't necessary to
> > paraphrase from the book of rich0 when for some reason he is
> > neglecting his no-doubt-numerous disciples on a thread that isn't
> > directly related to what is being cited...  I mean, historically it
> > hasn't been THAT hard to flame-bait me into responding to stuff...
> >
> Given that you are not presently on the council, it seems rather
> unlikely that you would be a present council member actively seeking
> divergent votes from the council and trustees. Further, making earnest
> inquires hardly seeks to qualify as deliberate flame bait, especially
> not baiting you when you are expressly not one of the parties whose
> opinion was sought. So, like, chill and stuff.

I'm not sure if you actually read the 72 lines of text that you
quoted, but it included the following line:

> So just to keep your IRC commentary on the ML record, ...

That was directed at me.  Hence I replied to it.  Just another reason
why it is better to not excessively quote.

Also, my email did not state that either your message or the one that
you quoted was flame-bait.  Only that yours was off-topic to the
thread, which it was.  This has nothing to do with the forums.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] Various IRC Discussions (was Deferred decision: Forums)

[desultory]

On 06/16/19 06:36, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 12:52 AM desultory <desultory@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/15/19 07:17, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>>> And while we're at it, can we just let people state their own opinions
>>> if they care to?  I realize everybody around here feels deprived if I
>>> don't weigh in on every single thread, but it isn't necessary to
>>> paraphrase from the book of rich0 when for some reason he is
>>> neglecting his no-doubt-numerous disciples on a thread that isn't
>>> directly related to what is being cited...  I mean, historically it
>>> hasn't been THAT hard to flame-bait me into responding to stuff...
>>>
>> Given that you are not presently on the council, it seems rather
>> unlikely that you would be a present council member actively seeking
>> divergent votes from the council and trustees. Further, making earnest
>> inquires hardly seeks to qualify as deliberate flame bait, especially
>> not baiting you when you are expressly not one of the parties whose
>> opinion was sought. So, like, chill and stuff.
> 
> I'm not sure if you actually read the 72 lines of text that you
> quoted, but it included the following line:
> 
>> So just to keep your IRC commentary on the ML record, ...
> 
> That was directed at me.  Hence I replied to it.  Just another reason
> why it is better to not excessively quote.
> 
Problem with that reasoning being that you did not reply to that
message, you replied to one which I wrote. The one you quoted, in case
that was somehow ambiguous.

Quoting the entirety of a message being replied to is fairly common
practice, if for no other reason than to curtail claims of quotes being
taken out of context. Which is somewhat ironic in this case as that is
arguably what you did by claiming to have replied to a message that was
itself quoted for context instead of the message to which you actually
replied. If you replied to the wrong message by mistake, just replying
to that effect would have been clearer, more concise, and less
confrontational than the approach that you took.

> Also, my email did not state that either your message or the one that
> you quoted was flame-bait.  Only that yours was off-topic to the
> thread, which it was.  This has nothing to do with the forums.
> 
Being a direct reply to that message, it did at very least make that
implication. And, pray tell, how is inquiring as to what the perceived
benefits of voting in a particular manner on the matter at hand off
topic when discussing the matter at hand? Is it your opinion that
council members should not consider the results of a vote when making
it? If so, why? Also if that is, as you imply, the case; what exactly
would the point of having the council vote at all be? (You made the
argument here, I am simply asking for clarification.)