On Tuesday, March 25, 2013 16:22:23, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> First of all, thanks to all three of you standing in the DPL election
> this year. I know it's a daunting task! :-)
>
> I've already seen some debate about how we could/should attract more
> contributors, which is a perennial question in Debian. I personally
> don't think we're ever likely to "solve" that issue permanently, but
> it's clearly something that's always going to be very important for
> us. I have a related question, but more on the opposite end of the
> spectrum I suppose:
>
> Are we strict enough with our existing contributors? When we're trying
> to work together as best we can to make the Universal Operating System
> happen, what could/should we do with contributors who hinder our work?
> Sometimes that hindrance is inadvertent, sometimes it seems
> deliberate. At other times it looks like we have developers who are
> just not paying attention to what they're doing or who just don't care
> about the goals of the project. Occasionally we see direct action to
> censure or even expel DDs, but these are only ever in the most blatant
> of cases. By the time that happens, large amounts of damage may be
> done to the project: delayed releases, lost users, loss of motivation
> for other contributors.
>
> I'm wondering: is this something that you think is a real problem, and
> if so what do you think we could do about it?
From my contributor/non-DD point of view, the latter part of the above is
something I'm repeatedly running into in Debian and is a problem. There is
also a distinct lack of information about how a bug reporter may try to handle
the issue of when a maintainer is repeatedly communicating in an abusive
manner; and what tools do exist are vague in helpfulness.
The video "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People" below describes
many of the common issues, and some solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE
At 7:45 in the video:
Community based on:
Politeness
Respect
Trust
Humility
"If a project is missing all of them, it doesn't last very long."
Right now Debian has no Code of Conduct concerning developer communications.
There's been some discussion of a "5-year plan" for coming up with one to help
this problem, but the same plan existed 5 years ago. Some may point out that
Ubuntu has a Code of Conduct, but Ubuntu wants packages to go through Debian.
Technically the DAM has the ability to act to remove a DD (per Debian
Constitution 8.1 item 2), but the information I can gather so far seems to
indicate that the DAM won't expell a DD for disciplanary problems.
https://lwn.net/Articles/147969/
----------------
Side note: the only DD I have heard of so far being expelled in 2006 for what
seems to be vaguely disciplenary reasons -- Johnathan/Ted Walther -- has an
interesting account as to the events that led up to him being expelled, which
sounds like there was an array of wayward social disfunction all around.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310&cpage=1#comment-241442
----------------
As a result of there not being any significant way of handling mintainer
misconduct, one of the common answers given to those that report misconduct is
to /tolerate/ it. But when this happens , the message that gets received is
one of /dismissal/ -- and if that happens concerning bug reports, it means an
increasing feeling that it's pointless to report bugs; i.e. "the chilling
effect". That might be one explanation for the steady drop in new bug
reports:
http://www.donarmstrong.com/posts/bug_reporting_rate/
And looking at the number of Debian Developers listed in the keyrings over
time and comparing it with the number of binary packages listed in each
release per Wikipedia, I see another interesting trend:
Year DDs DMs Release TotalDevs # packages
-------------------------------------------------------------
1999 494 slink 494 2250
2000 638 potato 638 3900
2002 1164 woody 1164 8500
2005 1167 sarge 1167 15400
2007 1167 etch 1167 18200
2009 1060 75 lenny 1135 25000
2011 899 131 squeeze 1030 29000
2013 976 186 sid 1162 38000
The number of Debian Developers seems flat from 2002 to 2013, yet the number
of packages from then to now has gone up by 375%. One would thus expect the
number of new bugs reported to go up, not steadily down.
As a bug reporter dealing with a misbehaving maintainer, this is what I would
want:
1. A clear place to report the misbehavior
2. A set of guidelines maintainers should follow
3. A public dialog about the misbehavior with some Debian authority
along with the misbehaving maintainer.
Note on (3): In the cases I've dealt with, the misbehavior was in public bug
reports, so the discussion of the misbehavior should likewise be public.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us
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