Re: buildd administration
This is an omnibus reply. Sorry about the thread-breaking, but I'm on
yet *another* computer, and I can't seem
to find a mailer which respects the In-Reply-To headers from the web
pages or lets me add my own.
==
I would like to note that I have made a practical and *new* suggestion
for dealing with some of these problems
(contrary to suggestions that I'm just flaming), because nobody's picked
up on my idea. From
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00298.html:
If they don't think that anyone is skilled or
trustworthy enough to help with the work they're already doing
....
(b) at any rate there is certainly someone
skilled and trustworthy enough to act as 'press secretary' for them,
collecting all the questions from the outside and returning the answers to
the outside!
I haven't heard this suggested before as a means to assist overworked
people in key positions with the problem
of communication. It would reduce the number of people the overworked
people have to communicate with to one, removing the need to explain
anything more than once. That one secretary could receive status
reports and use them to generate answers for all outside questions,
while batching together unanswered questions into groups. In addition,
that secretary could provide a contact addresses which is properly
advertised -- clearly not a task which requires great trust, but one
which does require close contact with the people actually doing the
job. Perhaps it would be more acceptable to the people involved than
the other suggested alternatives.
It has the virtue of removing some of the need for the people with the
key technical skills to also be the people with the key social skills.
I'm sure there are people who will volunteer for this role. I will
volunteer, since I certainly have the motivation, but I don't really
have the right temperment for it, or all of the right set of social
skills (though I do have a few skills in that area, believe it or not),
and I might be an unpopular choice. The overworked people should
clearly be allowed to choose their own "press secretaries" from among
the volunteers.
==
In response to something someone quoted that I wrote a while back: yes,
I should have found a better way of dealing with people who are behaving
idiotically than insulting them. I constantly try to find better ways.
I would expect that everyone should try to do that (after all, all of us
behave like idiots sometimes, me certainly included, and I had been
behaving idiotically by insulting people). That quote actually
demonstrates that I do *not* think that insulting people is effective.
Pity, since I'm so naturally good at insulting people in ways which
really get under their skin (really useless skill, but there you are ;-/ ).
==
Regarding specific points.
The scripts at www.buildd.net are clearly better at presenting the
information than the ones at buildd.debian.org (yes, it's mostly the
same information, but presentation matters). I agree that their source
code should be made publicly available, and it's a bad thing that they
aren't. :-P Ingo, could you fix that?
The 'status leds' for the buildds, together with the admin information
for each buildd, is a valuable addition beyond what's present on
buildd.debian.org, and if done properly would eliminate lots of "what's
wrong with the foo-arch buildds?" questions. It's sort of half-present,
with occasionally inaccurate admin info, at the moment, which renders it
less useful, but that would be fixed purely by cooperation.
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