Re: Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization
John,
As a peon(active user, not a package maintainer), I have been watching the
situation as well, and see what has been happening as being VERY similar to what
happened to the US government. The Government in the USA was designed around 13
states, not around 50. Because the number of packages continues to grow, and
the number of maintainers also continues to grow, the number of people involved
in ANY discussion grows as well. This means that there's too many people who
need to work together. It's hard enough to get a group of 10 people to decide
on what kind of topping to put on a pizza. Try the 400 or so people, all of
which are extremely active, and you get an impossible situation.
Now, while my input means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, I
SUGGEST that we reorganize things a bit. Perhaps with one person to organize
each part of the distribution. Base having one, Optional having one, Important
having one. While this may seem like it will fractionalize the distribution,
what it does is gives a smaller group of maintainers who might be able to work
together. The project leader would then work with these "leads". People would
still be able to work together, but it would cut down on the bickering, since
the leads could then work to decide policy.
Remember, Debian is a group of people who work together to make a distribution,
but the group has become VERY large. By having smaller, more focused groups, it
would speed up the decision-makeing process, and possibly improve the speed of
turnaround on new developers, since they would feed into their given area, which
in turn feeds into the main(or Contrib, or non-free, or non-US) distribution.
Dave Bristel
On 30 Aug 1999, John Goerzen wrote:
> Date: 30 Aug 1999 17:50:28 -0500
> From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
> To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization
> Resent-Date: 30 Aug 1999 22:59:52 -0000
> Resent-From: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
> Resent-cc: recipient list not shown: ;
>
> Hi,
>
> We have some serious problems. These are critical ones. It seems to
> me that our organization is breaking down.
>
> It's been a long time since our last release, which was already
> outdated when it came out. Our current release has numerous
> release-critical bugs with little progress. Boot disks have problems.
> dpkg is writhing away in the abyss, dselect is bordering on
> uselessness, bugs get completely ignored for over 800 days, and
> egotistical or power-greedy maintainers are actively compatative with
> those that submit bugs or try to help. Some maintainers think they
> are important enough that they can ignore policy; others are powerless
> to helpp. The SPI moves slower than a glacial pace, often ignoring
> important issues or botching paperwork. Granted, some of these things
> are being addressed, but:
>
> Where is all our effort going? Flamewars and power struggles. I have
> been essentially away from the lists, barely skimming, for two or
> three months now. What have I missed? Very little indeed, despite
> the thousands of messages that have flowed past. Yet more flamewars
> about FHS transitions, with still no resolution and more pointless
> bickering. Debates about who has authority to do what, discussions
> about utterly useless or trivial points, etc. are frequent.
>
> Why do we have all these problems? What has happened to civilized,
> thought-out discussion? Why is it that growing formalization
> (Constitution, etc) has only made things worse? And most importantly,
> how can we get people away from wasting their time insulting others on
> mailing lists and instead work on the distribution?
>
>
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