Re: Is this sufficient for an application?
On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 08:37:22PM +0100, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
> IANADD myself. But from reading mailing lists, I think the sentiment of many
> is that getting an account on the Debian machines should be a question of
> 'is it necessary for your work'?
This is something I've been mulling over for a while now. The main resistance
to having "non-packagers" as DDs is that it gives them access to things they
shouldn't have - a key in the keyring which allows them to upload packages,
and access to a bunch of "developer only" machines.
However, it does give them a couple of other things, too - the ability to shape
what goes on (through the voting process) and also a @debian.org e-mail address,
which (as much as some people try to deny it) does carry weight with the rest of
the world as being something worth having, and (to some extent) speaking for the
project.
I know that, in principle, there's nothing to stop a "marketing guy" or other
"non-techie" from "joining the project", I think that it's likely there would
be significant opposition on the basis given above - access to inappropriate
resources. I think so far there has been one "documentation guy" "inducted",
but I haven't seen anything greater since then.
> Package maintainers do need an account to do packaging work. Most others do
> not need an account - IIRC commit access to many cvs/subversion/whatever
> repositories is not coupled to an account. Of course, threre are grey areas
> where perhaps an account is not strictly necessary, but might simplify some
> tasks (bug triage: direct access to the bug database, to name an example).
Ayup. The big problem is, when you restrict access to resources, then you get
less people working on it. Debian has a long and glorious history of getting
things done because someone said "fuck it, I'm going to fix that!" and they've
done it. It's hard to fix something when you don't have access to the machine
it's running on - and that's the problem with restricting access to machines.
Obviously we can't let the whole world in there, but locking down machines to a
select few doesn't help innovation much.
> What else does one get when one becomes a developer? Most (all, except the
> DPL whois elected to do so?) DDs will not speak in the name of the Debian
> project. Of course, if you're going to build an advocacy/marketing group
> for Debian (which would certainly be a good idea, IMHO.), this topic has to
> be reviewed again.
I would recommend that Florian give NM a go on his marketing and documentation
skills - if you're reading this, send me your marketing achievements and I'll
look at advocating for you, although you'll have quite a time of it in NM. But,
if you get through it, you'll be paving the way for others to follow in your
footsteps, so I think it's worth giving a go.
- Matt
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