Le vendredi 19 octobre 2012 09:40:12, Christian PERRIER a écrit : Greetings Christian, First, let me take advantage of this mail to thank you for your tireless work on localization. > > Nowadays, would someone bet a coin that the same is happening? I would > not. In my daily job, I see students coming for post-graduate or > thesis work in scientific research departments (in optics, fluid > mechanics, material science, etc.). I talk to them (this > is my job to manage the needs of scientific departments wrt IT, in > our institution), I talk about their needs for their research work, I > talk to their staff. > > Definitely, the free software and Linux "culture" exists among people > in our universities (or in our typically French "Grandes Écoles"). But > Debian? Really? Not that much. I even heard (when people learn that I > am involved in the project) questions like "oh, Debian? Does it still > exist?". And, yes, here, Ubuntu comes up more often (I would bet that > more than half of students laptops installed with a Linux brand > nowadays are using it). Couldn't it be that the proportion of Debian users among Linux users has decreased but not the raw number? It's probably safe to say that Ubuntu attracted many new Linux users which could have changed that proportion. About the contributors, I believe most contributors in Ubuntu have an interest in working in Debian as well to reduce the diff size. > > For sure, this kind of "decline" is not that visible. We still have > new contributors, we still manage to do releases, we still have an > ever growing number of packages. But, we have less bug reports. We have > partly abandoned packages, including in the "core" of the > distribution. We have an installer that has just been "rescued" by > nearly a "one-man" effort. And I probably forget many other examples. Maybe the problem stems from the fact that contributions are focused on different components of the distribution than its core. Maybe it's even worse and potential contributors are more interested in doing android apps than working on Debian packages. > > This is sometimes hidden by the incredible work and investment of > several people in the project (yes, that's probably mean whoever is > reading this). I don't think it's mean to recognize the amazing work some people do. At least I don't feel offended. Best regards, Thomas Preud'home
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.