On Sat, Aug 04, 2001 at 12:13:02PM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> I agree with you. Otherwise, if nobody could be bothered keeping to
> reasonable minimum standards where would that leave Debian? An extreme
> example: "Oh, sorry, I know about the 'rm -rf /' bug in my postrm
> script, I might fix it next week if I get time..."
And if someone said that, anyone else who cared even slightly about the
package would NMU it, and everyone would be happy.
Unless no one cares about the package at all, or no one's interested
in doing any work, or everyone's too busy trying to work out who's the
guilty party and trying to avoid feeling any responsibility themselves.
If any of the latter is the case, Debian deserves to eat flaming death,
in my not even slightly humble opinion.
> However, it is currently up to each person to set their own minimum
> standards (depending on other demands), and to ask for help if
> required.
And I'm sorry, but this is facile bullshit.
There are 18619 open bugs at the moment, ignoring merged bugs. There're
12108 open, unmerged, non-wishlist bugs. That's well over 10k places
where you, personally, can lend a hand right now. There are almost a
thousand release critical bugs, over three hundred of which have been
open for more than two months. There are still a whole bunch of release
critical bugs in the base system. There are over a hundred packages that
need a new maintainer [0]. There are hundreds of priority assignments
that don't match packages' stated depends and conflicts [1]. There are
almost 200 uninstallable packages on i386 in unstable, and over 3000 all
up (excluding sh, which is completely broken) [2].
Good help is hard to find, especially when you have to hope for someone
to volunteer their free time instead of being able to pay them. It can
be and often is much, much harder than just fixing the problem yourself.
Getting bad help can be worse than just leaving stuff broken.
It's the responsibility of Debian volunteers to do the best they can,
for as long as they want to, and to avoid getting in the way of others.
If they can no longer do anything, or no longer want to, it's the
responsibility of those that *do* still care, and can still do anything
about it to do so.
Now maybe, _maybe_ when all the bugs listed above, and all the other
ones we can automatically obtain (like lintian reports, which aren't
currently available on an archive-wide basis) then there'll come a point
when we really do need people to go out of their way to list areas where
they need help.
But right now, we've got /way/ more problems than people. If you want
to help, try attacking some of the problems, rather than making life
harder for the people.
Cheers,
aj [3]
[0] http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
[1] http://ftp-master.debian.org/unmet-sid.html
[2] http://ftp-master.debian.org/testing/unstable_probs.html
[3] There's been a year or so now when "You can't make demands of
volunteers" hasn't been used as rhetoric anywhere near as often as
it used to be. Evidently, somewhere during that time a bunch of
people have forgotten it's true, and the basis on which at least
one person here volunteers.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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