This is the worst vote that has come up since I’m part of Debian. And Manoj — the secretary — has refused to listen to the remarks of many developers about the misleading titles/summaries, about the unjustified 3:1 ratio, and worst of all, about the mixing of multiple questions in a single ballot.
I have ranked misleading options (“Reaffirm social contract“ at least) lowest and below “Further discussion“ and sorted all the other options according to my preference, and ranked some of them equally when the choices answer different questions (where I can not prioritize any preferred outcome). I’m not yet sure if I put “Further discussion“ first or not.
There’s some hope that the vote will be cancelled and redone with separate ballots but I’ve lost trust in Manoj’s abilities to do his job properly. I’m sure he’s convinced that he’s doing the right thing but that doesn’t help at all, on the contrary. It also means we probably should fix the constitution to make it crystal-clear how the secretary should decide whether 3:1 ratio is needed for a given resolution or not. Not really the kind of thing I enjoy within Debian, but that’s the price to pay if we want to continue to work together. On this and much more I agree with Russ Alberry.
Update: Manoj resigned as secretary. I want to thank him for having taken this hard decision. And I sincerely hope he doesn’t resign from Debian completely as our strength is also in our diversity of opinions.
