Distributing the decision making is something I care about as much as you do. However, we need to be careful of oversimplifying ideas that will keep us from making progress.

I think this applies in two ways to our process. 1. Distributing decision making doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. 2. An artifact and it's set of policies, to remain viable over time need to be coherent. This does (IMO) preclude a number of different groups each pulling in their own direction. The weaker version of this argument, which I'll be far less hesitant about defending, is that making a *product release* at a specific date, precludes a number of groups each with commitment power.

To avoid going all theoretical, I'll note that Linus does distribute a lot of the decision making in Linux kernel development, but still, nobody puts anything into his tree without his say so. BTW, the infrastructures and the communities and the their leaders are very different, but I think this much does apply to us too.

And in our specific case, you don't see me telling KCP or MCP *what* to do. They both control that aspect. I do give guidance on what will make their work easier to accept into the mainstream, and mostly in terms of process, not content. If they decide to make radical changes, they'll have to convince people it's worthy, and provide an upgrade path we can support, but I won't tell them "no" a priori.

Daniel

goran.hultgren@bluefish.se wrote:

Craig Latta craig.latta@netjam.org wrote:

...

Daniel writes:

...

To add another reason againt a vote on this (not that I care very strongly): I didn't see a need for it because I think we can send the right message without providing an official moment of decision - after all, people do take their risks whatever we might decide, even officially.

If SCG fubars it, we won't merge their stuff. If they bring us good patches (the much more likely outcome), we'll merge them whether they have any "officially decided" status or not. Just remember this - once we've made decisions on a topic, we'll always be making decisions on that topic (paraphrasing Frank Herbert, in one of the Dune books). IMHO, giving advice is worth doing permanently, giving official badges isn't.

I agree with this, and it's why I abstained. (By the way, Göran, when one abstains, it's called an "abstention".)

Not to start another fruitless discussion (but that is probably exactly what I am doing), but I thought the idea of having someone as a Steward for a piece of Squeak was that the Steward had the "final saying" on that piece. You know, delegated responsibility. Otherwise the point of having Stewards seems a bit... moot.

That is also why the "trust" part is important. Of course, we could say NO, but that would probably essentially mean that we lost that Steward. And hopefully before that the arguments pro and con had time to boil down to something good. But having us say NO should be a very, very uncommon thing.

It still feels like the Steward should take the decisions - I mean, why should people otherwise be interested in being Stewards if it still means that everything needs to be crosschecked with us? The idea is to *distribute* the responsibilities but if no power of decisions comes with those responsibilities then the incentive of becoming a Steward is lost. IMHO.

Well, perhaps I have missed something here.

regards, Göran _______________________________________________ Squeakfoundation mailing list Squeakfoundation@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/listinfo/squeakfoundation