Re: Bits from /me: Difficulties in Deep Learning Framework Packaging
Hi Adrian,
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 11:07:34PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>
> How many percent of the paid GSoC and Outreachy student workers
> continue unpaid afterwards and become a DM or DD?
It's not realistic to expect a student to continue any unpaid effort
after the GSoC / Outreachy participation. I guess most of them come for
money and experience. Continuous Debian development is partially based
on love, enthusiasm and belief. It's not realistic to expect these from
a random CS student, as most CS students in the world live with
micro$oft malware or the apple OS. Many of my schoolmates, members of
the linux user group in my university, eventually end up embracing apple
OS after graduation and abandoned their ever-beloved Arch, Gentoo, etc,
due to various factors e.g. the 996.ICU working schedule.
> My impression is that GSoC does not have a high quota,
> and Outreachy is a complete failure.[1]
It's just Debian's proposals aren't attractive enough. Here
is a successful example of GSoC hosting organization:
https://github.com/opencv/opencv/wiki/ChangeLog#version410
Search for "GSoC" and 25 matches show up there.
And I somehow submitted a GSoC proposal to Gentoo this year.
> Assuming the student would succeed in creating packages,
> what we would get would be some complex packaging of
> packages with a very volatile upstream - and the only
> person who understands the packaging is likely gone.
Some ideas and proposals in the Debian community, including tensorflow
packaging or DUPR, aren't quite proper for GSoC students unless they
have strong motivation to do so. Maybe people could provide some more
attractive and interesting ideas for GSoC students. Or the students
won't understand "what on earth is this hosting organization doing".
> The work Mo spent on the already-outdated tensorflow package in
> experimental was wasted if there is noone who continues maintaining it.
> And the same would be true for other new packages if the packager
> disappears afterwards.
Debian should have already got used to the fact that volunteers are
scarce resource.
> What is actually needed are one (or ideally several) people with
> a long-term commitment to maintain these packages.
I think most of such long-term + high-workload maintaining works are
actually backed by salary.
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