Re: long term goals of debian membership
On Dec 03, Brian Mays wrote:
> > > Take dpkg, for instance. We don't let just anybody work on that
> > > code. It is far too important to trust to just anybody. Ian
> > > Jackson was careful to guard it against tampering by unqualified
> > > hands, and he was correct to do so.
On Jan 19, J?rgen A. Erhard wrote:
> > Does this mean someone wanted to maintain it and was refused to do
> > so because "the Developers" didn't deem them good enough?
Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> replied:
> Suffice it to say, it had nothing to do with dpkg or anything on
> -private; my recollection is that iwj treated dpkg as his personal
> fiefdom long after he stopped actively working on it.
Yes. Ian was very protective of his code.
> I don't think anyone other than iwj said "nobody but iwj is trusted
> enough to work on this package";
Actually, Ian never said this. Ian did not mind others working on the
code if they were qualified. He had very high standards, however, and
he was not timid about expressing his opinion on the ability of others.
The same is true today, to a certain extent. Dpkg is still maintained
by very competent developers. Anyone is free to submit a patch to fix a
problem or implement a feature, but he or she should expect this patch
to be throughly scrutinized before any changes are made to the code.
- Brian
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