On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 23:46:53 -0800 Mike Bird <mgb-debian@yosemite.net> wrote: > On Fri January 14 2011 22:06:21 Christian PERRIER wrote: > > You're right. No Debian developer is involved in large institutions > > or corporations where hundreds of such servers are in use. All > > Debian developers are kids playing on their parents' computer to > > build a distro, during hacking nights, instead of doing their home > > work and learn at school. > > You're mistaken Christian. Mike, you missed the sarcasm completely and just went on another rant about two (unrelated) bugs which affect you directly. Guess what - I don't give two flying figs about those two specific issues because they don't affect me. I care about the underlying problem. You also changed the topic of this part of the thread to something much more interesting and important - lack of responses to RFH bugs - and then put nothing in the body of the reply to actually relate to the new subject. Please don't waste time on specifics - there is a much wider, much more important, systemic problem here which you have identified in the subject and then abandoned. Can the rest of us now actually ask if there is anything we can do to get more people involved in helping packaging teams which are openly asking for help? If Debian isn't doing the right things to attract helpers, then there is no solution for the users in this thread who are basically complaining about packages with lots of bugs and not enough manpower. Debian cannot afford to have multiple versions of big package sets - especially where the current options already have lots of bugs. There is not the manpower to have two complete boot systems or two versions of a complete desktop environment, no matter what the upstream support. People are complaining about lack of bug fixes (dressing that up as accusations of poor maintenance in Debian) and DD's are replying with examples of where there is simply not enough manpower to deal with the bugs - we all know which packages and package sets are struggling to handle the bug load. Making it specific / explicit doesn't help. Replies often become sarcastic or humorous to try and deflect the guilt that maintainers are not able to find enough people to work in their teams. It's not that a particular maintainer or team of maintainers are bad maintainers necessarily, there's no point making sweeping statements that maintainers should step down. Who's going to volunteer instead? It's obvious from the QA pages and the RFH bug lists that nobody is stepping up to take on the work. Criticising those who are struggling to do the work - but at least are still engaged with it and trying hard to fight the negativity of such a workload - is not helpful! Even when a team is fatally under-resourced, who would blame the remaining team from not wanting to work with someone who is only ever criticising the team without doing the work themselves? Instead, what actually does happen is that overworked teams look for help using the current systems, rants start on lists like this and people in the overworked teams get individually picked on and bullied by people who don't have time to help with the work themselves. Result? People get even more negative about working in such overworked teams and find something more enjoyable to do. Teams lose the few contributors who did actually get things done and it all gets worse. Criticising does not help an overworked team. Unless there are people willing to join up and do the work, there is no point crying out for ways to identify maintainers who should be replaced or forced to step down. The problem is a lack of manpower in critical teams. That's not new. The symptom is an impossible number of bugs and a lack of time to support multiple variants to satisfy different requirements. The result is that Debian as a whole gravitates to one particular solution which suits the needs of those willing to do the work. That is inevitable. If nobody is willing to do the grunt work of maintaining the alternative, the alternative does not get maintained. That's obvious, isn't it? Fix the problem not the symptom. Stop moaning about the results of the problem and let's try again to fix the problem. Moaning about it just makes it harder to actually get things done! (Including wasting my time writing this long response when all the problems in it are well known already.) None of this is new, it's been a problem in Debian ever since I got involved and from talking to others in Debian, for as long as they can remember too. Ignore the specifics, this is not about specific packages, specific teams, specific sub-systems. This is and always has been a completely general problem, not just to Debian but for all free software. There are people out there willing to help but mostly they don't want to work on the same areas as those which are providing the largest source of complaints and that is often because of rants and criticisms of those teams by people not actually trying to help directly. Teams have to work together, the people involved have to be able to get along. It's not good enough to just throw random people at a problem - the team has to enjoy working together. Ranting about the problems in overworked teams does NOT help attract people to those teams! We're all here as volunteers and to enjoy what we do for Debian. Those who want to criticise must step up to the mark and put in the work. File bugs, by all means, but respond to your bugs, help the maintainers and don't just whine. Otherwise, such non-helpers deserve to be ignored in favour of working with those people who are at least willing to help the team deal with the workload. Now I've ended up with a rambling, repetitive mess instead of a re-edited, cohesive argument because I've run out of time and won't be able to do what I wanted to do for Debian this morning because I've been writing this instead. HELP! -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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