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Re: What will improve Debian most?



Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au> writes:

> So here's the question, and really the only part of this mail that
> warrants a response:
>
>     Over the next twelve months, what single development/activity/project
>     is going to improve Debian's value the most? By how much? How will
>     you be involved?

Maybe you meant to ask "what are you going to work on over the next twelve
months that will improve Debian's value?"  Because the right answer to
"what one thing is going to improve $FOO the most in the next twelve
months," for pretty much any value of $FOO, is "ask us in twelve months
and we'll tell you."

Personally, here's some things that I plan on working on over the next
twelve months that I think will improve Debian's value:

* Implement (or merge implementations from others) of multiple
  repositories, archive areas, and architectures in Lintian.  Redo the
  Lintian reporting scripts so that they install as regular programs with
  documentation to make it easier for other people to set up Lintian
  checks of private repositories.

* Whittle the Debian Policy bug backlog down considerably and document in
  Policy some of the things that are currently underdocumented from a
  standardization perspective, to provide a more concrete standard and
  increase their visibility.  For example, I think better Policy
  documentation of diversions, alternatives, and symbols files would be
  straightforward and useful.

* Try to do real work as part of the Debian Technical Committee, hopefully
  resulting in resolving issues and reducing the decision backlog.

* Add support for the new PAM automatic configuration to the two PAM
  packages that I maintain.

* Package more tools and utilities for maintaining Kerberos realms and
  OpenAFS cells.

None of these are exponential and I don't care about percentages with any
of them.  I'm okay with that.  I don't think those are useful measures,
and I don't think exponential growth is a useful or interesting goal.

One thousand people all improving the parts of Debian that they care about
produces incredibly impressive results.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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