Re: potato late, goals for woody (IMHO)
Needless to say, I realized that there >is< an issue that I hadn't
explored in my idea: I had forgotten that I was dealing with an
organization that has done it's damnedest to ensure that no volunteers
were available to work this. Given that the reason that new-maintainers
was open to flux was this minor issue, I do regret that I hadn't thought
it all the way through.
On Thu, 4 May 2000, Dale Scheetz wrote:
>
> Gag me with a spoon!!!
>
> Elegant? Hmm, I don't think that word means what you think it means...
IAW Lord Ockham's razor...
> Aside from creating a worker/slave class dichotomy, your idea of elegance
> leaves me with a great deal of intestinal discomfort.
...as opposed to now, which is a first class citizen/no class citizen
relationship based on when they got "into" Debian? Those that DID find a
way around the flying fickle finger of fate that Debian thrust at them
to become a maintainer in potato were in a relationship far worse than
worker/slave. Given the alternative, I'm sure that being told to fix bugs
in return for official recognition would've been considered a blessing.
> You know, if more people were actually working on a release instead of
> talking about how to make the release mechanism better we would probably
> release more often ;-)
I've already been over this once a couple of months ago. DON'T *DARE* TO
COMPLAIN ABOUT LACK OF MANPOWER!!!!!! New-maintainer was closed through
the entire development cycle of Potato. If manpower really was an issue,
then logically there wouldn't have been an impassible barrier to
recruitment, now would there?
> Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to idea discussions, but this is just
> not very well thought out. Aside from the fact that it would probably
> triple the archives size, it creates, from scratch, a completely new
> development effort with all the communications and design problems that
> entails. Under structured conditions where bosses can insist on the
> behavior of underlings, you might pull this off, but certainly not in the
> asynchronous environment of Debian. There is a slim chance we could come up
> with enough volunteers if we restricted our efforts in this regard to
> only Standard and above packages. This would probably require that we have
> at least 50 volunteers to manage the 200+ packages in Standard. As a
> comparison, take the new maintainer process, which created the loudest
> outcry for change, and produced slightly less than 30 volunteers, several
> of whom have found themselves unable to contribute due to other
> constraints. So, unless you get a rousing ground swell of support, this
> scale of project is just not executable in this environment.
Actually, it'll only incerease the archive size by half again in
the worst case--Debian is already split into unstable and stable at all
times, and a third set of packages would only be an issue during what is
now a non-freeze time, which would have another set of packages almost
exactly the size of either stable or unstable. As far as the minor issue
of people, I'm kind of guessing that a rousing swell of support is kind of
out of the question in this case, considering what Debian has done with
said support in the past. As for creating a new design effort, that's
because the present method isn't getting the job done. This thread
didn't just spontaneously generate out of thin air. So either create a
new effort or get the present effort working. Yes, it's going to take a
lot of people, and no, I doubt they'll be breaking down the doors to
become developers now--they've been told to go to hell once, why should
they try again?
> Bottom line: We have never made an enforced assignment to any developer.
> We have never said, "You must do work of this type, before you can do
> other work."
No, for the entire development cycle of potato, it was "don't call us,
we'll call you".
> If you think you can implement such a practice, I have only one word for
> you: deluded ;-)
If you think that the system now in place beats my idea, I guess I can
wait in line for the title. (backatcha)
> Luck,
>
> Dwarf
> --
> _-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
>
> aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (850) 656-9769
> Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road
> e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net Tallahassee, FL 32308
>
> _-_-_-_-_-_- See www.linuxpress.com for more details _-_-_-_-_-_-_-
>
There is an old saying that if a million monkeys typed on a million
keyboards for a million years, eventually all the works of Shakespeare
would be produced. Now, thanks to Usenet, we know this is not true.
Who is John Galt? galt@inconnu.isu.edu, that's who!
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