Galloping featurism is not the problem
From: Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@pathname.com>
> I'm beginning to believe that Debian may never be a stable system.
Please define what form of stability is desirable. Does stability imply
significantly more management of the package maintainers? Would
defining a restricted subset of Debian with an enhanced support
organization satisfy a need for stability?
> A slight, but significant, attitude change may be the solution.
I'm open to the possibility of a distribution derived from Debian,
but containing only a carefully tested and audited subset of Debian's
packages. Even a list of packages that could be used to download
this restricted subset would be an improvement.
> from "what can we add?" to "what must we add?"
> from "what feature is missing?" to "what bug needs to be fixed?"
The strength of Debian is that the choice of feature set is made by
the user (or perhaps the OEM), not by some central coordinating soviet.
Nobody says to the prospective maintainer "no, you can't add a package,
we'd prefer you work on fixing bugs".
> from "what doesn't do what I want?" to "what is difficult to use?"
This is fine, but it is an individual maintainer decision, or a collective
decision if the members of the collective are willing to _do_the_work_.
For example, there is much work to do on the installation system as far as
ease of use is concerned. Dselect is an obvious candidate for improvement.
I wish you'd take one of these areas and work on it, rather than
attempting to find some way to fix bugs _by_improving_our_policies_.
Part of the price of an open development model is a lack of central
control. For example, I know you consider Christophe sloppy. However,
after going through a phase of complaining about stuff to the people
who were doing the work, Christophe went off in a corner to write
software and implemented a tremendous improvement to Debian that
neither Ian Jackson nor I had tought of. This is what we might
sacrifice by going to a more restrictive development model. So, please
consider means of improving the system stability without disrupting the
development model.
If I had the power to tell _you_ what to do, I'd send you off into a
corner to work on a more naive-user-friendly "dselect". We could get
more done by improving that than we could by arguing policy on
debian-devel.
Thanks
Bruce
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Bruce Perens K6BP Bruce@Pixar.com
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