On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 02:44:15PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > This is for all candidates. > > Releasing is regularly the hardest thing that Debian does, not just > technically but also socially. Apart from the standard issues of setting > deadlines, RC bug counts being high, and similar difficult technical > issues, the process seems to eat volunteers. There's usually always at > least some frustration, anger, and upsetness, and there seems to usually > be at least one resignation over the course of a release, often in a way > that hurts other activities in Debian for a time. I believe social issues are the main problems Debian is still facing at this time, not just in the release process. > Do you have any ideas how, as DPL, you would (or even could) address this? > I'm personally the most concerned with the social issues. The social issues in our community are self-enforcing. That is, if it is accepted that people are rude, then there is nothing you can really do about repetitive rudeness towards your person, beyond resigning. However, if we, as a project, decide that no, rudeness and ad-hominem attacks are not acceptable, then such things will not go unnoticed. As a DPL, I will promote, in whatever way I can, to publicly (but politely) disapprove of what should be unacceptable behaviour; but also to allow people to make mistakes. > A delayed release can be frustrating but doesn't have that much > negative impact, but volunteers with enough knowledge of Debian to be > able to serve as release managers or helpers are rare. And usually > the arguments not only hurt their contributions to Debian but usually > hurt the contributions to Debian of the people on the other side of > the argument as well, who are often also valuable and > difficult-to-replace volunteers. Indeed. I use a different wording, but basically outline the same thing in my platform, and I believe it is the single most important problem Debian is facing currently. Finding volunteers is hard; keeping them is even harder. If we do not have a welcoming community, then we drive people away, and we should not do that. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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