Debian Position On The Tech Board

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 12:58:09PM -0700, Jono Bacon wrote:
> Today I started having regular calls with the DPL, and I took a series
> of actions to check into. One of which is the current situation
> regarding having a Debian Position on the Ubuntu Technical Board. I seem
> to recall Bdale agreed to such a position, but (a) does Bdale have a
> position on the Technical Board (I don't see him on
> https://edge.launchpad.net/~techboard/+members#active) and (b), if so,
> is Bdale on this mailing list and has he participated in much
> discussion?

Bdale is subscribed to this mailing list, has turned up to some
meetings, and has participated in some discussions where they've been
relevant to Debian.  He's a non-voting member of the TB which I think is
why we didn't add him as a member of the Launchpad team.

> The reason for asking is that I think it could be useful to sync up some
> of the discussions and activities on the Technical Board with the Debian
> Technical Committee where it makes sense, and the DPL and I both agree
> that the Debian position on the TB is a good conduit for this.

One thing I've noticed is that not many of the TB's discussions at the
moment are actually all that relevant to Debian (the majority of them
tend to be more Ubuntu-specific procedural kinds of things, perhaps
regrettably).  It's also worth noting that the Ubuntu Technical Board
and the Debian Technical Committee are not in practice quite as parallel
as they look on paper, even though it's very tempting to treat them as
direct analogues; they act in different ways, and in particular the TC
has very definitely always taken a position of being the last resort in
technical disputes while the TB has more often tried to set technical
direction.  These are reflections of the different structures of the two
projects.

I certainly continue to be in favour of there being a Debian
representative on the TB, and it's worth us remembering to explicitly
involve that representative when it's relevant.  So far, my perspective
is that Bdale's presence has been helpful and sufficient in cases where
it's been relevant so far, and so I'm not sure there's a problem to
solve here right now.  Do you have a specific concern, or is it just a
checklist item?

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]