Draft Policy: Dependency Changes and CI

[Eike Hein]

On 01/22/2017 10:58 AM, Sandro Knauß wrote:
> For me the whole text sounds to bureaucratic and too many "you can do this 
> after waiting that long" .

I hear you, but we just had a major blow-up about this topic where
people got extremely agitated and threatened to walk out. The hoped
benefit of specifying the details in a policy doc is that it gives
people a clear idea of what is expected of them and what they are in
their right to do and when, which ideally minimizes opportunities
for blaming each other instead of blaming the doc.

If you go back to the original discussion, a central problem was
that sysadmin wants advance notice, but it wasn't clear how much
advance notice is good enough, and devs had concerns about too
long time windows in context of projects with short release
cycles, etc. - this was a major bone of contention, so I feel the
doc had to make an attempt to submit a compromise. The doc tries
to make a compromise between what people felt in their right to do
and reasonable.

Note that this document isn't necessarily set in stone for all time:
We try to live with it for some time, and if it turns out we can't,
we kick off another discussion process to refine or replace it. I
expect that people understand a fresh policy needs a trial period
before killing each other over it. I also expect people to make a
honest effort to try and follow it, though.

Bureaucracy can be a nuisance. But it can also slow things down
when needed, and dissipate strong emotions by turning them away
from people.


Cheers,
Eike