Re: Bits from the Release Team - Kicking off Wheezy

[The Fungi <fungi@yuggoth.org>]

On Tue, May 03, 2011 at 11:41:35AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
[...]
> I've always found it strange that, as a volunteer project, we are
> creating a product that is mainly used in professional
> environments.
[...]

I see that as a side effect. The same qualities of stable which lead
me to rely on it on for a vast number of servers in an ISP/data
center setting also make it an ideal platform for the servers which
host and provide services to the whole of the free software
community... much the same way that the volunteers who maintain
buildds, mirrors and the bulk of Debian's infrastructure are almost
certainly also enterprise, service provider or university technology
professionals by day.

The lessons learned in those environments help demonstrate what
technologies do and don't scale. A volunteer sysadmin managing a ton
of infrastructure for a large free software project is, given the
opportunity, going to choose a platform which requires as little
maintenance as possible. This increased efficiency maximizes the
impact of his or her contribution to the community. In many cases,
this is Debian's stable release.
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