Re: MAINTAINERS file

[Karl Fogel]

Nick Roberts <address@hidden> writes:
> Chaos is never favourable, although anarchy may sometimes be.  Someone has
> to always arbitrate over any disagreement.

This is not true.  For example, in the Subversion project there is no
arbitrator.  We try for consensus, and if there is unresolveable
disagreement, the global committers vote.

A vote has happened only twice in the history of the project:

   - To decide on the name of the command line binary ("sub" vs "svn")

   - To decide whether we would put a space before the opening
     parenthesis when writing C function calls and definitions. 

I think this is evidence that consensus, with democracy as a fallback,
can work pretty well! :-)

>  > Let's wait until there's a problem before imposing a solution like
>  > this.
>
> Like what?  There always has been a power structure for Emacs but I
> guess up till now it's been so simple that it didn't need writing
> down before.

A power structure is not needed, when you have revision control (so
changes can be undone) and forkability (so dissenters are never
trapped).

You might ask: what then is Chen and Stefan's role?

Answer: default moral authority to prevent bandwidth-consuming votes
for every little dispute.  If enough of us grant them the right to
make judgement calls (and I certainly intend to abide by their
judgement when I'm unable to convince them of something), then the
project will run efficiently and they will have the ability to enforce
consistency on the codebase.

This is the only authority RMS ever had, really.  Being root on the
repository and mailing list servers is not decisive: it cannot prevent
a fork if people are determined to fork.  The consent of the
"governed" is the only thing that makes this work, in the end.  It has
done the job up till now, and I see no reason why it can't continue.
There's no reason for us to put potentially costly dispute-resolution
structures in place in anticipation of problems that may never arise.

-Karl