Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
David Nusinow <david_nusinow@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 11:00:15AM -0500, Erinn Clark wrote:
>> * Thomas Hood <jdthood@82-171-132-56.dsl.ip.tiscali.nl> [2005:12:21 12:23 +0100]:
>> > Team maintainership is working very well for some other distributions.
>>
>> That may be true, but it's not a good argument for forcing such a
>> situation in Debian.
>
> I agree that we shouldn't force teams on anyone, but I'd like to see more
> large-scale teams encompassing loosely connected smaller packages[0]. If,
> for no other reason, than for developers to claim ownership of (and by
> extension responsibility for) the whole project rather than their little
> package feifdom. It might help overcome the sense that key people aren't
> communicating, as well as provide more easy avenues for NM's to get
> involved that don't simply involve packaging some crap little script from
> freshmeat.
That sounds good, but there's a back side, too: If you maintain a couple
of packages in different fields, you'd be forced to be part of a couple
of these large-scale teams, and this could create a lot of unnecessary
work - and if it's just to learn which information to ignore. For
example, I currently maintain two packages:
- teTeX, which is already team-maintained, but a large-scale team could
be formed with the maintainers of all TeX-related packages (many of
them maintained by people who are just users and mostly interested in
different things)
- netenv, a network environment chooser for laptops - this would mean
I'd be part of a "network stuff" team
If I find time, my next project within Debian would be to package
JabRef, a bibliography database that nicely works together with LaTeX,
but is written in Java and would mean for me to be part of the Java
team.
Being part of three large-scale teams would clearly be too much for me
(at least if I really want to be part, and not just receive mail which
is promptly sent to /dev/null), meaning I would have to give away one of
the packages.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
Reply to: