Re: Discussing issues

On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Kendall Bennett wrote:

> Mark Vojkovich <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> >    What's the matter with defining "large enough" to be "has made
> > significant contributions over many years"?  That sounds like as
> > good a metric as any, perhaps better than all others.  Though I
> > can pretty much guarantee you that by that definition the vote
> > would leave pretty much all of the current board and core intact. 
> > 
> >    This appears to disturb some people.  Why is that?  And what
> > justification do you have that this is not the best way for things
> > to be - with the people who have contributed the most having the
> > most say?  
> 
> To answer that, let me quote something you yourself said so well a few 
> posts back:
> 
> "While there are things that people have a right to demand - they have a 
> right to demand to be able to contribute..."   
> 
> The above clearly outlines to me why "the people who have contributed the 
> most having the most say?" is clearly wrong. Just because you have been 
> developing XFree86 code for many years, what right do *you* have to 
> control what *I* can contribute to XFree86? The mere fact that such a 

   The fact that I've have written and maintained particular parts
of the code gives me the right to reject misguided modifications to
that code.  You should not be allowed to get any code you see fit
into XFree86.  There needs to be agreement on the part of the people
who know the most about that code.  Most of the time, defering to the
opinion of the maintainer/author is suitable.

> small list of people control what does and does not get into XFree86 
> means that mine and everyone elses contributions to XFree86 stand a very 
> large chance of getting lost. As you said above, myself and other 
> developers have a right to demand to be able to contribute, and IMHO that 
> is entirely what this discussion is all about.

   I would be happy if this is what the discussion was about.  
Some people are discussing how we can get the problem of contributing
code solved, but others, including the person who started this
whole thing has been using the fact that there are problems as
an argument for scraping not just the commit mechanism, but the
entire leadership structure of the project.


			Mark.