[kde-community] Discussion: KDE Manifesto, "established practices"

[Peter Grasch]

On 11/19/2013 12:20 AM, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> a.) keep the language as is: "Legally" meaningless, just to convey intention
> 
> It is worse than meaningless: it was formulated in a way that will eventually 
> be abused.
Without a definition of "established practices", so could -
theoretically - be the updated language.

>> b.) make it precise enough to clear up any confusion. only then it becomes
>> actually enforceable. This would imho include a list of the "established
>> practices" we're referring to - with links to their full policies.
> 
> The list of practices defined change over time, so adding a list of them not 
> only erodes the brevity of the Manifesto but it would easily drift out of 
> date. The practices are not even steady from project to project within KDE, so 
> this becomes impractical. 

So in other words: You are in favor of the newly proposed language that
establishes that all KDE projects have to follow some set of
"established practices". However, actually telling people what those
practices are is impractical or even undesirable?

How does that help "[give] people coming into KDE a realistic set of
expectations"?

> The practices defined in those individual documents changes even
> more frequently than the list of said practices and are far too
> extensive to include in the Manifesto.
Just for the record: I never said that the actual practices should be
documented in the manifesto but that imo there should be references to
the full text of what people are committing to.

> As for “enforceability”, perhaps you are confusing “useful guidelines” with 
> “laws”.
The old text conveyed the exact same idea, but it was obviously much
softer. The only time when I see this "softness" make any kind of
difference - and coincidentally also the only concerns you have pointed
out so far - is when the manifesto is given de-facto law-like power.

> The current formulation is a *bad* guideline because it says “hey, we 
> have established practices, but you can ignore them at will if you can think 
> of a good excuse”
This is really not what it says. Specifically, it does not specify the
limits of "special considerations". Assuming that everyone get's to make
them up as they go is a stretch, to say the least.

(Let's please also please not get this discussion heated, please. I
understand that you have had bad personal experience in this area in the
past but there is no reason to act rashly now. Thank you.)

Best regards,
Peter