On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 10:51:40AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > Do you have examples of collaborative maintenance projects where the
> > "no one is responsible" part plays a role, making people willing to
> > go back to non-collaborative maintenance?
> Yes, there was a mention of it just this month on
> #debian-devel. I am unwilling to derail this thread with the merits
> of the maintainer and package team's position in this instance by
> naming names and bringing the affair into the limelight, but I can
> send you excerpts of the log privately.
Yes, please do so.
Still, if all goes down to if DDs feel better about team maintenance
than individual maintenance, we can easily set up a poll and check the
numbers. As a figure it would be pretty interesting to me.
> It could go either way, of course, but I was referring to the
> difference between due diligence of a group, as opposed to an
> individual; potentially, a team is only as strong as the weakest
> link.
That's nonsense. How do you support the "weakest link" argument? Teams
like we have in Debian do not work serially, and the contribution of all
involved members is not always required. The most common "bad" behaviour
of a DD is inertia, which comes and go for everyone of us. An inert DD
is in my picture of the situation the weakest link, but has no effect at
all on the resulting quality of a collaborative maintenance group.
Back again to my experiences: inert DDs come and go in projects, setting
up a good example of spontaneous turnover.
> On the other hand, the team may haul up a slacker lone
> developer to higher standards. The point is, no one can say ffffor
> sure a priori which road shall be taken.
You are of course right here, but we can produce numbers (back to my
first argument here). Just ask DDs, IF---as I think---a vast majority of
people who moved from individual maintenance to group maintenance is
happy, IF the resulting quality of packages is not decreased, and IF
there is no similar majority of people happily moved in the other
direction THEN we have evidence that in practice collaborative
maintenance works better than individual.
At the point there would be no excuse for not pushing, as a best
practice, as a policy, as fallback, whathever, collaborative maintenance
more than we actually do.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-
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