On Sat, Aug 04, 2001 at 06:24:31PM +0100, David Starner wrote:
> From: Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
> > Should I have avoided doing anything
> > 'til Richard realised he wasn't really interested in working on it?
> No, but the door was a little more open there. In the case of a package, you
> can't do anything major until the maintainer realizes he isn't interested in
> working on it. In the case of the DAM, there's almost nothing anyone can do
> until he reliquishes some control.
I'll jump in here rather than anywhere else because this comment is just
so completely backwards it's funny.
For packages, you can do whatever you want to them, whenever you like,
if you're a developer. All you have to do is grab your PGP key, run a
couple of programs and upload to incoming. Within a day, your version
of the package is mirrored worldwide and installed an, what, hundreds,
thousands of machines?
If that's not the complete opposite of not being able to do anything
major, I'm not sure what is.
Compare this to either managing the release (or managing "testing"), or
managing access to Debian itself, and I don't see how you can possibly
even imagine the door's even a little less open trying to make changes
to packages.
Making changes to how we do the release, or how we manage accounts is
*not* something to be done likely. Both these things affect (basically)
*everyone* in the project: managing the release affects sysadmins who need
to work out when they want to upgrade the servers, and resellers working
out whether to spend money making more copies of the current release or
to hold off on the new one; managing accounts and authorising PGP keys
affects whether you can have any faith in the Debian distribution being
what it claims at all.
Which isn't remotely to say that you can't help with these tasks. The
example I offered above (ie, me helping Richard out with potato's release)
is a case in point. I'm not particularly special: I wasn't born with a
birthmark in the shape of a crown on my right shoulder; I wasn't taken
from my mother at birth by an agent of the Cabal and thereafter trained
for my future role in the upper echelons of the Project or in smiting
the peasantry. I just did what I could, tried to do it competently,
and offerred to help; and it happened that the person I offered to help
thought both that I was competent and could use the help.
If you want to go back to the case that started this thread and others,
you're quite welcome to do the exact same thing. Demonstrate your
competence by becoming an AM and doing some good work, and offer to help
front desk or James out.
That's what you can do. Right now. Without anyone relinquishing anything.
Without anyone demanding anything. Without anyone even whining on -devel
about it, or showing how it inevitably leads to the coming Apocalypse.
For reference, in this particular case, no one's actually done those
things. We've got a bunch of competent AMs who don't have the time or
inclination to do DAM work, and a handful of people who claim they'd be
quite happy to get r00t on *.debian.org and add accounts and whatnot,
but haven't demonstrated that they'd actually be any good at it.
To repeat: if you see something you don't like in Debian, or see something
you think can be done better, *that* is how you fix it. That's what it
means to be a volunteer.
And conversely, what being a volunteer means, and what annoys the "heck"
out of me, in that no one else *ever* gets to say how you have to spend
your time as a volunteer. When you join Debian, you don't get given a
tasklisk, "spend this much time manning the phones, then fix these bugs,
then have smoko, then do this, then do that". You don't get told you have
to do such-n-such properly or you'll get thrown out. The only thing you
do get told is not to get in other people's way when they're trying to do
their bit.
As an exercise to the reader, try thinking of the requirements for NMUs,
or policy, or RC bugs, or whatever else in terms of that. Trying thinking
of just about any requirement Debian makes on you, and whether it's
either just about getting you to avoid stepping on other people's toes,
or whether it'd be better loosened so that it is just about getting you
to avoid stepping on other people's toes.
But this nonsense about getting to demand people in the project have to
actively do stuff, or "else" needs to stop.
Cheers,
aj
--
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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