Re: Debian doesn't have to be slower than time.

[Michael Neuffer <neuffer@sciobyte.de>]

Quoting Thomas Bushnell, BSG (tb@becket.net):
> "Joel Baker" <lucifer@lightbearer.com> writes:
> 
> > The way that I talked about previously in this thread. If a task is too big
> > to be completed in one release... then the task is too big. Break it up,
> > and make it into smaller tasks that *can* get done.
> 
> There really are packages which require lots of time, even if they
> don't require all 8000 packages to be changed.
> 
> If emacs policy, say, were to be significatly changed in some ways, a
> lot of packages would be implicated.  You seem to be saying we should
> just never make those changes.  
> 
> Saying "if there's a big change, just break it up" doesn't answer the
> question.  Some changes really *are* big changes and just take real
> time to implement.

Most of the times however it is simply a question of getting all
affected packages rebuild. And this is exactly where we have most 
of our problems. Except for Debian maintainers that earn their money 
by working on Debian or Debian related things, you can not always 
expect them to react in a timely fashion, since they have "real life"
requirements to attend to as well. And even those "professional"
Debianers often have business requirements that come first.

A Debian equivalent to the BSD "make world" would solve this part 
of the problem. 

People need to get rid of the notion that _they_ are the maintainer
of _their_ package and nobody else may touch it. This is simply 
foolish. 

Of course I am not saying here that the developers Foo, Bar and Baz
should suddenly start making changes to, for example, Brandens
X packages and uploading them. Things like that always need to be 
coordinated through experienced people.

However the discussions like we had in the past, that we can 
not migrate to a v2.4 kernel, because we can not get everybody to 
upload new packages within the timeframe of half a year......
simply become a joke.

Cheers
    Mike

-- 
People often think of research as a form of development -- that it's 
about doing exactly what you planned, doing it on time, and doing it 
with resources that you said you'd use.  But if you're going to do 
that, you have to know what you are doing, and if you know what you 
are doing, it isn't really research."
             --Dave Liddle, The New Yorker, Feb. 23/Mar.2, 1998, p84