Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization
Hi,
We have some serious problems. These are critical ones. It seems to
me that our organization is breaking down.
It's been a long time since our last release, which was already
outdated when it came out. Our current release has numerous
release-critical bugs with little progress. Boot disks have problems.
dpkg is writhing away in the abyss, dselect is bordering on
uselessness, bugs get completely ignored for over 800 days, and
egotistical or power-greedy maintainers are actively compatative with
those that submit bugs or try to help. Some maintainers think they
are important enough that they can ignore policy; others are powerless
to helpp. The SPI moves slower than a glacial pace, often ignoring
important issues or botching paperwork. Granted, some of these things
are being addressed, but:
Where is all our effort going? Flamewars and power struggles. I have
been essentially away from the lists, barely skimming, for two or
three months now. What have I missed? Very little indeed, despite
the thousands of messages that have flowed past. Yet more flamewars
about FHS transitions, with still no resolution and more pointless
bickering. Debates about who has authority to do what, discussions
about utterly useless or trivial points, etc. are frequent.
Why do we have all these problems? What has happened to civilized,
thought-out discussion? Why is it that growing formalization
(Constitution, etc) has only made things worse? And most importantly,
how can we get people away from wasting their time insulting others on
mailing lists and instead work on the distribution?
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