Re: [gentoo-project] Questions to nominees

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

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>>>>> On Sun, 20 Jun 2021, David Seifert wrote:

> 1. Do you feel you have enough time to commit to serving as a Gentoo
> council member in the 2021/2022 term? Does your commit activity
> support this?

Definitely yes to both questions.

> If you served in 2020/2021, have you prepared for council meetings and
> finished all unfinished business for which you were responsible (as a
> council member)?

No unfinished business.

> 2. Project X and Project Y have irreconcilable differences, but you
> aren't involved with any of the projects. A crucial technical decision
> needs to be made. How will you react? Will you defer?

That's the kind of questions that are difficult to answer without a more
concrete example. :)

Generally, I'd try to discuss the issue with both teams, and then go for
a solution that I think is good for the distro as a whole, but that both
projects can live with. In my experience, keeping the discussion at a
technical and factual level also helps.

> Do you consider abstaining a viable option for the group of people
> making decisions as a last resort?

Not in the situation described above. There are other issues where I may
abstain from a vote, e.g. if I was involved with one of the projects.

> 3. Given your typical area of responsibility, how have you performed?

I am active in all projects I am a member of (look them up on my user
page on the wiki, no "placeholder" projects there). I also believe that
I was responsive to any questions in a timely manner, typically within a
few hours.

> 4. What positive change/idea/plan do you have for Gentoo that you would
> try to further (not necessarily as a council member)? By positive change
> I mean actually changing something concrete, not some diffuse notion of
> "improving how the council acts" or non-tangible deliverable.

- There's a reorganisation of GNU Emacs packages pending, related to
just-in-time/native compilation that will be available with Emacs 28.
Not yet sure how large the impact of this will be. We also need better
integration with upstream package archives (ELPA, MELPA, etc.).

- I have some ideas how to improve license groups. Currently, especially
the GPL compatible licenses with exceptions aren't handled in the best
possible way. We also need a mapping between our license labels and the
ones used by the SPDX, so that automatic detection tools can be used
more conveniently.

- Represent Gentoo at events again, as soon as it will be possible after
the pandemic.

- Start collecting items for EAPI 9. :)

> 5. Do you think the council should be more agile - i.e. take decisions
> for the purpose of propelling Gentoo forward, rather than waiting for
> the decision to be made for it?

This has been brought up repeatedly in the past and was mentioned in
countless manifestos of Council members, but not much has changed.
IMO a volunteer organisation doesn't function in that way, i.e. the
Council cannot tell people on what they should work. (If you need a
concrete example, the Council has voted three times for the feature
mentioned in bug 489458. We still don't have it, because nobody has
implemented it in package managers.)

Ultimately, Gentoo's progress is driven by developers and users having
good ideas and implementing them. Of course, nothing prevents Council
members from having good ideas either.

> Would you consider a small number of departing views on the mailing
> list or IRC to be enough to derail a proposal?

"Number of views" may not be a good criterion. One must rather look at
the arguments themselves.

> When do you consider a controversial issue to have been discussed
> enough?

When no more new arguments are being presented.

Ulrich

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