Subject: [bug#61894] [PATCH RFC] Team approval for patches

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:19:57 +0100

Hello Simon,

Am Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 10:46:08AM +0100 schrieb Simon Tournier:
> Hierarchy already exists, as in any social group, as in any group of
> people collaborating.  The hierarchy is currently informal.

while I am sensitive to your argument about privileges, I am afraid that
the suggestion would remove privileges from the committers, while not
bestowing them on anybody else; as a result, everybody would be worse off
than before. Right now one out of the (let us be pessimistic) 20 active
committers can push any patch from the issue tracker, say for a package
trivially obtained via "guix import pypi ...". With the suggested change,
the currently 1 (and in future hopefully one out of a few) members of the
python group will have to approve the patch. In that situation, there is
no incentive for anybody else to even look at the patch (without agency,
why would one bother?), and we will effectively have split the Guix project
into a collection of walled gardens.

I think this suggestion has the potential to make a stuttering project
grind to a complete halt. And I am afraid that we are on a track to
replacing joy, agency and community by grind and bureaucracy.

I suggest to close this issue due to a weak consensus against the proposal
(or at least the lack of a clear consensus for it).

Andreas