Re: Deficiencies in Debian
On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Martin Schulze wrote:
> This mail is some major rant. I've already ranted in private and was
> asked several times to move this to debian-devel. I've added some
> more problems I have detected. Most of the following was discussed
> either with a bunch of developers and keen people at the Linux
> Kongress.
I agree with Joey, hopefully someone will come up with an implementable
plan to deal with these real problems. As an aside, I know of lots of
-users- who basically have the same concerns.
> . Release goals
>
> Officially "we" have decided that we don't want to have release
> goals anymore. Now there were rumors that all packages will have
> to be converted to be FHS complient for potato. There still was no
> public announcement.
This does suck. Without planning how are we expected to have any
direction? We dropped the release goals because IIRC we never met them,
which is just as bad..
> As a maintainer for several packages, I'm still confused what to do.
Agreed, the FHS mess has been badly mishandled and carried out too long.
I'm fairly decent with my emails and I never saw the actual message that
finalized it.
> . Boot-Floppies
>
> It's not clear if/who is working on boot-floppies and into which
> direction we're going. Obviously there is nobody working on it
> speaking of a general direction, and nobody's about fixing all
> those darn bugs. Even worse the current boot-floppies are not even
> compilable or will work on potato if they would be.
This might be unfair, I'm told people are working on it, but I don't
monitor their work.
> . Stable subreleases
>
> It seems that only very few people care about our stable release.
> Out of the security team only one person spent brain on it, the
> ftpmasters only worked on unstable, the new Stable Release Manager
One of the huge complaints I hear about Debian is that it is outdated.
With all the new fangled rapildly changing huge package sets [Gnome, X11,
KDE, etc, etc] and our continuing bad luck with decent reverse
compatibility there is a real problem with our stable releases being
useless to a segment of the userbase
> We have ben acknowledged that we need to reduce pre/postinst
> interactions and some proposals have been made that are known as
> "Configuration Management". pre/postinst questions will interact
> with a database that is able to contain preconfiguration so cluster
> installations are easier.
There are rumored to be people working on this too..
> . Buggy packages
>
> Even though there are quite a lot registrated developers (~550 by
> counting logins) there are over 4000 packages with outstanding
502 registered developers actually:
samosa{jgg}~#ldapsearch '(&(keyfingerprint=*)(gidnumber=800))'
keyfingerprint | grep -i ^uid | wc -l
502
I think one more of those will go away when I load the new keyrings.
I estimate that around 100-200 developers are actually still 'with us'..
[yes, I'll make a script that does that eventually..]
> I believe that this "strategy" will lead Debian into death if we
> continue as before. Therefore things have to change. Since I'm not a
> manager either I can't come up proper ideas all the time, and since my
> time is limited I cannot force people to do the right thing.
> Processing mail already takes much more time than working on software.
Someone needs to stand up and take responsibility for this whole thing and
just dictate what we are going to do [by vote, by fiat, whatever].
Jason
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