Re: Doom of Debian Re: Debian Weekly News - February 18th, 2003
On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 11:02:36PM +0100, Davide Inglima wrote:
> Martin Schulze wrote:
> While Anthony's proposal of "Reviewing all upstream changes" makes sense on
> a security standpoint, it will put the necessary strain to Debian to
> self-destruct the distribution.
Right. There are some who believe that the strength of open source lies
in ubiquitous peer review. Debian (and open source software in general)
can _only_ benefit from more review, and upstream authors might actually
pull their socks up and improve their code if they knew other's would
read the diffs.
> There already are problems to port 6000+
> packages on (how many? 7? 11?) different architectures, this harmful easter
> egg could be the drop that tops off the distribution. I have already begun
> to see growing disaffection to GNU/Linux by former enthusiast people, and
> this can simply spell the final doom on the credibility of open-source.
This is utter nonsense. The point of Debian is not to have gazillions
of k3wl packages. The point is to have software that works well. In
other words Open source gains credibility from quality. Quality comes
from rigourous peer evaluation. This is a key difference with closed
source and is one of the unique selling points of open source. People
review the code.
I personally don't give a shit whether micq is in Debian. I do care
about the fact that maintainers are simply accepting patches into
packages I do use without reviewing them. That lowers quality and leads
to lack of credibility.
Sean
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