Re: ITR: Leaving the Debian project
NOTE: I am not a Debian Developer.
On Fri, Jul 30, 1999 at 02:18:16AM +0200, Leon Breedt wrote:
> Reasons:
> - Turnaround time on projects is very very slow. A lot of
> people have good ideas, but are intimidated by the amount
> of flames directed at innovation and new ideas.
> Much of these ideas then remain vapourware or pie-in-the-sky.
This is true, and not true. There's a lot of flameage on debian-policy of
late -- not because of fear of the new, but because:
A. People aren't happy with things that don't fix all related problems in
one fell swoop.
B. People aren't happy with things that aren't perfectly elegant... even in
cases where somthing obviously needs to be done.
C. When there is a case of tradeoffs between two (or more) plans thare are
inelegent differently, both sides oft (or at least, it seems that way)
think that their way is obvously better -- and the policy mechinisim
encourages loud public arguments because an objection is a weapon of last
resort that you're expected to use only when it's obvious that the policy
is not supported by the developer body at large.
A formal objection is an absolute, but revocable, veto. You should use
it when you think a proposal is not in the best interests of Debian. It is
a flag that says "you have to convince me first", not "I am dead set
against this, and am beyond changing my oppinion, no matter what the
evidence." If the later is your view, you should not read debian-policy.
> - I cannot handle the increasingly bureacratic nature of
> Debian. In my opinion, too much time is spent in
> "deciding to decide".
This is a problem with any political (by which I mean simply "dealing with
policy") process involving a large body with free power of debate. It isn't
a good process, but I think it's one that's better then any other we could
reasonably have.
> - Us vs the rest of the world attitude sucks.
I've acatualy seen _very_ little of this. Less, I think, then any other
list I've been on devoted to a purticular product (possibly with the
exception of lynx-dev).
> So, I'll be switching to another distribution that meets
> my needs more satisfactorily and doesn't alienate its
> developers.
Good luck.
> Having not seen this done before, I do not know the procedure,
> but wish to be taken off of all relevant developer-only lists.
(As another person mentioned rather snipply, there is a section on this in
maintaner-guide. It says you should have posted this to -private, but I
disagree with the entire concept of having a -private.)
-=- James Mastros
--
If you find sombody with a better policy process with a similar-sized
developer body, drop us a note.
Reply to: