Good grief ! Re: Deity project schedule problems
(NB: I have my own views on the Deity team's approach. However, I
don't think that's relevant to what I'm going to say.)
Why are we having this flamewar ? OK, so the Deity project is behind
schedule. Wow, I'm so surprised. After all, we know that free
software always releases on time, and that it is best for us to push
for hard deadlines rather than getting the code right.
I don't think that we should be surprised that an ambitious project
takes a while to produce anything. The problem is that some people
appear to have been thinking that they should not do whatever they
wanted about dselect because Deity was going to Solve the Problem Real
Soon Now.
Software, especially free software in a supposedly open organisation
like Debian, is not like that. Everyone should feel free to implement
what they want and then we can choose between them or merge the best
features of each. Build one to throw it away !
Now, regarding the political matters:
Yes, there are some of us who think that the Deity project's closed
nature is harmful. I'd be quite happy for an argument to be held here
on debian-devel about that, where perhaps some conclusion can be
reached that will be more helpful to the rest of the project.
However, it is not good for major Debian honchos to pull rank and try
to force people working in their spare time to toe a particular line.
Bruce, in particular: please do us (or me, if you prefer) a favour and
lay off the heavy management stuff. If you have a problem with the
way Deity is or is not developing then the solution is not to get on
your high horse and tell them what to do. The solution is to persuade
them or someone else to sort out the problem in a way you can live
with, or to write the code you want.
Having people with responsibility for particular areas is one thing,
but having people being other peoples `managers' and taking their
technical and political decisions for them is not going to be
conducive to good atmosphere in this project.
What we should be talking about now is:
Do we wait with 2.0 for Deity ? My answer would be `no', which means
something needs to be done in the meantime. We should implement
something like the `pre-selected list' schemes being discussed in
the technical branch of this thread.
Ian.
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: