Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian
Hi Colin!
You wrote:
> What the exact steps should be to accomplish this goal aren't completely
> clear to me, and I doubt they are to anyone else either. We have come a
> long way, but there is a lot more to do. Just for example, take the
> thread about Euro support. Certainly, Europe is part of the Universe
> which we want to support. So, all of Debian needs to support the Euro.
> Well, how do we do that? For some programs this may require something
> as trivial as setting an environment variable, but for others it could
> be quite complex, requiring code/program design changes. So even the
> steps to getting to full Euro support aren't well defined.
>
> For something even more nebulous, how about *full* Unicode support?
> Even a goal that upon a cursory glance seems as concrete as "a full
> replacement for Microsoft Word" has innumerable substeps.
The problem here is IMHO that while such large projects (unicode
support, hardware detection, full debconf support, etc) require effort
and thought from _all_ debian developers, while at the moment, they are
given thought and are being worked on by _individual_ developers only.
Our infrastructure should be such that the ideas of those indivuals are
easily picked up and concretized.
> I think Debian is really defined not by its internal structure, or even
> things like the Social Contract or the DFSG, but by the people, who
> choose what to work on at will. We have to have some concrete
> definition (i.e. policy, the DFSG), of course, or things would
> disintegrate into chaos, but just creating structure doesn't make people
> work on filling it in.
Sure, I do of course agree with you that everyone should be able to work
on whatever part of Debian he/she wants. This is IMO one of the greatest
advances of the Debian organisation. We don't want to go to a situation
in which an imaginary "Debian Chairman" could order somebody to do something.
However, we should have a system to detect which parts of Debian need
attention and in what part things go wrong.
--
Kind regards,
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Bas Zoetekouw | Si l'on sait exactement ce |
|--------------------------------| que l'on va faire, a quoi |
| zoetekw@phys.uu.nl | bon le faire? |
| bas@A-Es2.uu.nl | Pablo Picasso |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
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