Re: Some proposals
On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Joel Baker wrote:
> The 'core team' that is responsible for what is formally released is
> relatively small, *and* it has a relatively small amount of stuff to take
> care of. Combine the kernel and GNU libc teams, maybe throw in about half
> the current X Strike Force (biased towards the upper end). That's it - and
> that's all the software they actively maintain and promise to try to make
> work.
>
> The entirety of /usr/ports on FreeBSD or /usr/pkgsrc on NetBSD is done
> by the non-core team, and, as a whole, is not in any better state than
> Debian's 'testing' usually is (barring artifacts caused by our promotion
> scheme from unstable). Sometimes it's closer to unstable itself. And any
> given port is, in fact, frequently only looked after by one or two people.
>
Thanks. All I know of *BSD is only from the outside looking in so I
should have guessed things are more complicated than they look.
> I'm all for consider questions such as "should Debian have an official core
> team, and some official packages like dpkg or apt that are shared among
> all of them". I don't claim to know the answer, nor even that the current
> situation is broken, but it might be a reasonable question. But what you're
> proposing, overall, is not actually how the BSDs appear to work, and for
> that matter, runs afoul of some fairly basic observations of how humans
> tend to operate en masse.
>
> (When there is no responsibility, things either never get fixed, or they
> get fixed in broken ways that nobody can track down the cause of, for
> one example - Developers put their reputation on the line in doing their
> packages, and for most of them, that *is* motivation to try to do work that
> Doesn't Suck - and, for that matter, to do work at all).
>
I did not think such an approach would involve giving up personal
responsibility altogether, but merely taking more interest in the system
as a whole rather than just ones' parochial little packages. If you look
at the people doing the "big picture" stuff in Debian, it's quite small.
Can we make that group bigger? This was one idea there may be better
ones.
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/
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