On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 03:17:55PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 11:27:17PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > As is probably obvious, I have a tendency to answer questions that > interest me, whether they were intended rhetorically or not. I seldom ask purely rhetorical questions. > > [...] Imagine Debian as simply a collection of bits sitting on a box > > somewhere. No Project machines. No mailing lists. No BTS. No > > keyring. No master archive. No mirrors. How easy would it be to > > pursue our purpose then? > > The alternative extreme would be to imagine we had a bunch of project > machines, a bunch of mailing lists, a state of the art BTS, a keyring, > tonnes of donated project machines, a mirror network, dozens of machines > setup to do automatic building and testing of packages every day... but > no actual software we can give users to install. > > I'd think the former hypothetical project would be far more useful > to potential users, and have better achieved our goals than the > latter. Certainly it's fairly easy to go from a good collection of bits > to a viable and useful distribution: Knoppix has done so, for example. > Equally certainly, getting the bits in the first place is non-trivial. Sure. But if one wants to do anything more than a small, one-off project -- and one is not determined to be a one-man show -- one is going to need some sort of infrastructure to support it. Otherwise, one's project plan is almost literally a joke: 1) Collect underpants. 2) ??? 3) Profit! > > You tell me -- are issues other than technical ones important at all? > > I'd've thought it was obvious that I find issues other than those that > directly affect users important; I have and do spend a bunch of time > working on those sorts of issues, after all. But I think it's especially > important for people who do do that to remember that the important > job isn't working on the processes, it's working on packages. It's > so important because, I believe, we have to ensure that all the time > and energy we spend working on process stuff pays off in improving our > operating system more than if we'd just worked around the bad processes, > and hacked on code. > > Especially given that all the candidates seem devoted to working on > process issues rather than our operating system itself, it's important to > me to know whether they share that recognition. Unfortunately, just asking > doesn't work, since it's traditional for candidates up for election to > recognise every concern that's put before them as enormously important, > whether that will actually mean anything later or not. Well, according to the vote page for this election[1], we have 908 developers. Of those, 3 self-nominated for Debian Project Leader. That's about 0.3% of the developer population. This statistic does not suggest to me that we are not drowning in people who are so obsessed with rectifying process issues that they ignore all else, even assuming that accurately describes the candidates. I believe that if we can substantially correct our process problems: 1) Technically capable developers will be comfortable devoting a greater proportion of their "Debian time" to technical matters; and 2) the Debian Project will appear (and be) a more smoothly-operating organization that attracts more technically savvy people to it, who then drive us to greater heights of achievement in service of our goal -- the best possible 100% Free system we can make. [1] http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_001 -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | Yeah, that's what Jesus would do. branden@debian.org | Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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