No, there is no cabal

I have a theory. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who see conspiracies everywhere, and those who don't. Personally, I'm part of the latter group; and it annoys me endlessly when people in the former group use conspiracy theories to explain what they don't understand—much in the same way that I don't really understand people who use religion to explain what they don't understand.

An example of what I mean:

Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote about the stuff he'd like to change in Debian, since he feels many things go wrong. Now even though he doesn't mention the word 'Cabal' anywhere in there, it still reads as someone who sees conspiracy theories in Debian.

No hard feelings, Marc, but...

  • It doesn't really help to 'enforce' addition of new architectures. Arguments like "I've heard that foo said bar" don't really help, either; please go find out for sure. If you can't or won't, then please do assume that those people who did care enough to find out know what they're doing.
  • Adding more official suites, such as volatile or backports, increases the burden on the security team and others. This isn't something that should be done lightly, and so "just" adding a CNAME won't really fix it.
  • I don't see why the practice of porting machines should be "resurrected". Yeah, sure, some of them are down, but we all know hardware sucks. That doesn't mean there's malicious intent or a change of policy or anything.
  • I'll agree that it's a bad thing that some people in core teams aren't delegates, especially when they don't do their job. There are many core teams of which the members aren't delegates, such as the security team, the listmasters, the maintainers of our default MTA, the d-i team, the kernel team, the X strike force, and a huge bunch of other teams; if and when they stop doing their jobs, that would be a serious problem.
    I also really don't believe it's a good idea to go to a specific team that you don't have any experience with, and start dictating terms.
  • With my m68k buildd maintainer hat on, I can tell you that adding more buildd maintainers to any architecture is a bad idea. I'll gladly explain the details in more detail later, if there's any interest.
  • You do know about the draft updates to the FDL, right? We've put forward our position, now it's the FSF's turn; and though they considered updating the GPL to be of higher priority, they didn't ignore our opinion, which one can easily see if they read the discussion drafts.

I could go on, but I guess you got the point. Like I said, conspiracy theories annoy the hell out of me. Marc, it isn't personal, you're just the last in a long list.

Oh, and BTW: comments to this post will be moderated away.