On Mon, 06 Nov 2017, Didier Kryn wrote:

> Le 06/11/2017 à 00:33, Clarke Sideroad a écrit :

> > Sounds like a healthy expansion to me, congratulations in arriving
> > at it.  Caretaker leaves an impression in my head of everything
> > from a god like science fiction entity to a custodian/janitor.  So
> > plenty of scope. (-;
>     This invention reminds me of the novel of Philip K Dick "Clans
> of the Alphane Moon", in which the moon is governed by the council
> "sine qua non" ;-)

ahahah, yes indeed our council includes all clans: pares manses heebs
etc etc...

jokes aside, the "Caretakers" term is really there to indicate
stewardship more than leadership, as part of a soft transition towards
a governance that must and will always serve the Devuan community.

as Clask also mentions:

> I'm not sure of the actual structural form envisioned for Devuan.
> There has to be some vertical structure and a group of 'n' at the
> top, it is IMHO unavoidable.

the actual structure envisioned is "in fieri" with a good starting
point from the Debian's principles which were harshly betrayed: keep
minimal and serve the interest of its users (including downstream
distros!). I also think that, despite the initial negative response of
this community to the "purpy book" by hellekin and natacha, some good
principles about the process of establishing governamentability can be
found in there.

as "caretakers" we should be facilitating the implementation of the
uncontroversial choices this community approves and in general
dedicate a lot of attention to "regression" implications, as we do
need to "take care that what is there still works". This is also well
attuned to the concern many of us share here to efficently support
existing hardware against consumerist practices and to optimise energy
and resource usage when planning an IT infrastructure.

thus "caretakers" are really fairly conservative experts who show good
understanding of minimalism and UNIX principles and are highly
available through the making of Devuan. We are not supposed to
"propose features", rather than being able to listen and summarise
well what our community wants from us. Only in highly conflictual
cases we'll run a vote which will anyway require a majority of 4 to 5.
So far all decisions were taken with complete consensus and a long yet
useful process of listening everyone's concerns especially with
regards to the current infrastructure upgrade.

My gratitude goes to all of you for encouraging us, to Linux O'Beardly
and Nextime for reliably hosting core parts of our infrastructure
through the years (we are now almost 3 years old!), to all the growing
community of mirrors (now also package mirrors!) and of course to all
the people donating money to the project: we'll soon update our
financial report to reflect its status, as Devuan's funds are being
used to rebuild Devuan's online infrastructure as a network of secure
machines that are entirely paid by Devuan's donations and sponsors.


ciao