On Sunday 18 June 2006 19:41, MJ Ray wrote: > - Sven has powerpc skills which look vital to d-i and haven't been > replaced; They have been replaced as far as possible and a call for extra help has been sent out several times to the d-powerpc list and has even been published in DWN. We have had some response to those requests. I would agree that powerpc skills are vital to d-i; I disagree that this makes Sven vital to d-i. Nobody is (or should be) irreplaceable in FOSS and history has often proven that to be true. We have never denied that Sven has valuable technical skills and we do appreciate his many contributions to d-i in the past. > Where is the d-i commit access policy stated? The nearest I found > was http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/svn which isn't > very clear. There is no formal policy [1]. The policy in practice is that everyone who shows that he can contribute to d-i and is willing to be part of the team can request and will normally be granted commit access after we have some indication of quality of work and commitment to the d-i project. There is a fairly strong review of commits by a few people for code changes and we have some quality assurance tools for translations. There are currently 3 project admins, any of whom can and does add/remove people from the project. There are currently 145 members of whom 92 are not DDs (mostly, but not all, translators). Sven's "quote" is true to the extend that, within the policy stated above, the d-i team would welcome anybody interested in working on the powerpc port, but I have never phrased it in the way "quoted" by Sven. We don't make a habit of turning help away and don't do so lightly. > Will there be a working d-i on powerpc without Sven Luther's > contributions? Yes, there will be. Certainly for the main chrp subarchitecture (which includes the powerbooks so many developers use) and hopefully for others as well. I won't deny that powerpc support may lag behind for some time and it also may take some time before we can find additional people willing to work on powerpc and especially the other subarchitectures (like prep), but I have no doubt that eventually other people will come forward. Note that a lot (if not all) of the issues that are currently present in d-i for powerpc originated when Sven was still the d-i powerpc porter. Cheers, FJP [1] For translations Christian Perrier has set up a fairly formal "new language" procedure [2] which is mostly aimed at making new translators aware of tools. Although this procedure is for new languages, that often implies new translators. For existing languages the existing translation team will mostly help new translators joining that team. [2] http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/i18n-doc/ch03.html
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