Re: Getting people of different teams together
Hi Michael,
Apologies for not responding sooner - I didn't see your question on
the list... :-/
Michael Kesper wrote:
>
>thanks for such a nicely written report (Summary of the Secure Boot BoF at DC19)!
>
>What I want to comment on:
>
>On 21.10.19 03:36, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>> The awkward bits
>> ================
>>
>> Time
>> ----
>> It's taken a *very* long time to get this into Debian. We've been
>> talking about this since ~2012, only in the archive in 2019. Why has
>> it taken seven years?
>>
>> This is a very complex topic that required cross-team collaboration
>> from (at least!) 5 different teams in Debian: Kernel, EFI, FTP, DSA,
>> buildd.
>>
>> Debian works really well when people can work independently - it's how
>> we have thousands of contributors working on tens of thousands of
>> different source packages without forever blocking each other.
>>
>> But here we had busy people (and teams) waiting on each other,
>> multiple times. There there were several different proposals and we
>> needed many rounds of discussions before we eventually got to our
>> solution. Huge progress was finally made during a sprint in April 2018
>> in Germany when we had people from *all* the relevant teams together
>> in a room for the first time. It's amazing how much better things can
>> work when then feedback loop is measured in minutes rather than weeks!
>
>Could this be a "lessons learned" for Debian?
>
>Who could identify stuck processes and could gather involved parties
>together for a weekend/week or so?
>
>I presume that this is not the only issue where getting together (in person
>or not) and focussing on one issue makes the difference.
Exactly. This is one of the most important points I wanted to raise in
the talk, so thanks for picking up on it! :-)
We do have scope for getting together for sprints, and a supportive
DPL who will agree to us Debian funds for them when we obviously need
them. The difficult bit is identifying when things are stuck and might
benefit in this way, unless you're directly involved.
We do publicise sprints too, but we need to keep pushing the message
so that people will consider asking and setting them up like this. I'm
not sure what more we can do - thoughts?
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
Armed with "Valor": "Centurion" represents quality of Discipline,
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