[kde-community] Proposal: KDE Manifesto wording revision

[Eike Hein]

On Tuesday 12 November 2013 17:34:41 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> +1 for getting rid of “must”; -1 on getting rid of accounts; and yes, we
> probably need to find some better wording for “project assets” since it
> trips people up.

On the accounts one, after hitting send I was back to pondering,
about that, too ... it's a question of what we're after, conven-
ience, extending the chain of trust, or both.

For example, when we were trying to expand into Gitorious.org
for hosting, people had to sign up with Gitorious on their own,
and then there was a separate verification step where sysadmin
interacted with the account holder to verify their identity and
establish a mapping between a KDE SVN account and a Gitorious
account, extending the chain of trust and subsequently allowing
the Gitorious account to write to KDE repositories on Gitorious.

When the Manifesto was crafted, several people felt it was im-
portant that we stay open to experiments of this sort, and not
codify implementation. I.e. "access needs to be there, and
making it happen is ultimately up to the sysadmin team (and at
their discretion given resources), but how the happening looks
like should not be defined".

Deciding whether to drop or keep 'accounts' along those lines
is difficult. With previous practice, securely establishing
identity is sufficient, and the wording makes it clear that
this has to be possible for *all* contributors. That's why I
felt dropping 'accounts' might be fair game.

OTOH, the Gitorious.org scheme was also a big hassle and a
resource drain, and ultimately one of the reasons that contri-
buted to the decision to abandon Gitorious.org and self-host.

But perhaps this is exactly why accounts doesn't need to be
specified: Since it's a hassle, there's already pressure not
to do it, there's already a force causing sysadmin to say 'no,
we can't reasonably do this', and we've seen both happen.


Cheers,
Eike