Re: long term goals of debian membership
Hamish Moffatt (2000-12-05 20:59:06 +1100) :
> I heard from a new maintainer last weekend (if I got this right)
> that prospective maintainers don't have to nominate a package
> they're working on.. when I joined in mid-97, you had to at least
> nominate a package you were working on. Is this correct?
As a prospective maintainer, I had (and still have :-) to provide
"2-3" packages that I work on. I expect that depends on the AM.
> Although people don't need an @debian.org address to help with
> Debian (and the coolness factor has warn off on me), only registered
> maintainers get any real recognition for help with the distribution
> eg on the Debian web site. Can we do anything about that?
Independently of whether we can or should, I'd just like to point
out that one of the big power sources for the free software movement
is precisely peer recognition. We package stuff because we hope
someday a beautiful princess (or handsome prince, or AI, or whatever)
will come to us and say "I read your name in a changelog.Debian.gz
file, and I've admired you ever since, let's have sex (or food, or
interesting philosophical discussions, or whatever) right now" [1].
The other power source is known as "the Itchy and Scratchy show".
That power source just induces us to make debs, not to try and publish
them in an official way.
Another point: supposing we (or "you", at the moment) accept less
and less people as NMs, isn't there a risk that Debian forks? I mean,
independent people would make debs for their favourite software and
publish them on their personal website. There is a risk of
duplication of effort, and users would have to /manually/ add
deb-lines to their sources.list. I confusely feel that would not be
good, but I'm not clear about that.
Roland.
[1] Or am I special?
--
Roland Mas
Au royaume des aveugles, il y a des borgnes à ne pas dépasser.
-- in Soeur Marie-Thérèse des Batignolles (Maëster)
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