<quote who="Steve Langasek" date="Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 02:30:46AM -0700">
> And maybe I'm too heavily steeped in Debian culture to take an
> objective view, but I don't see any reason why translators,
> documentation writers, artists, et al. should look at the term
> "developer" and conclude it's not for them.
First, none of these groups usually think of the work that they do as
development. That's just not he way the word is used. But that'a
semantic argument. The larger reason that this is a problem is
because:
(1) We as a project (and an NM project) are hesitant to give these
people developership since it means they can upload to the
project which introduces a set of potential risks and problems
(one more account to compromise, etc).
(2) Our NM process is highly optimized and documented for testing
technical knowledge and package maintenance. Documentation is
maybe an exception. A pure advocacy NM would run into trouble.
If we can address those two issues, I think my issues with the
terminology will go away.
> Developing an operating system is what we *all* do; not just
> packagers or maintainers, but also documentation writers, bug
> submitters, buildd maintainers, QA folks, translators, and everyone
> else. The term isn't "software developer" or "programmer", it's
> simply "developer", which I think encapsulates the concept of what
> Debian is, and I wouldn't like to lose that.
> I'd rather see us do a better job of communicating this principle to
> prospective developers instead.
Fair enough.
Regards,
Mako
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako@debian.org
http://mako.cc/
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