Meeting summary/minutes from today's FESCo meeting (2010-09-14)

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 20:48 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:

> Is anyone else feeling a little uncomfortable about the voting process,
> irregardless of its conclusion?

'regardless'. 'irregardless' would mean 'not regardless'. =)

Yes, I agree, and I'd like to point up another procedural issue here.
During the meeting it was generally assumed that this was just a usual
'do we approve this feature' vote, in which case the 'default' would be
'no', and the onus would be on the 'yes' side to get five votes to have
the feature approved. It was essentially rejected by default - it was
rejected because there weren't five people voting in favour, not because
there were five people voting against.

I think this is an erroneous interpretation, because this wasn't a
normal 'do we approve this feature' vote. systemd had in fact already
been voted on as a feature at an earlier fesco meeting and had been
*provisionally accepted* - that is, it was accepted, with the proviso
that if fesco was particularly worried about something, it could reverse
that acceptance any time prior to beta release.

Given the previous provisional acceptance of systemd, I would argue that
the situation at the meeting should actually have been that *accepting*
systemd would be the default case, and it should have taken five 'no'
votes (or five 'yes' votes to the proposal 'do we reverse our earlier
decision and reject systemd?') to reject it - it shouldn't have been
rejected just because five yes votes couldn't be found on the day.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net