Re: RFC: Changing the NM system
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> Andreas Voegele <andreas.voegele@gmx.de> writes:
> Adrian Bunk writes:
> > > Every Debian developer represents Debian (e.g. at exhibitions)
> >
> > Do you think that all the long-term maintainers always represent
> > Debian in a favourable way?
>
> I am not sure that you understand what the project is. The
> project is not a company, with a mandated party line; the project is
> comprised of a multitudfe of people, all with varying agenda's and
> view points (though there is a large overlap).
>
> If Debian is a sum of its members, then it the view points of
> Debian are also a sum of the views of its members; and one would be
> doing our users a disservice by artificially suppressing reality.
Then why does Adrian Bunk seem to think that some Debian developers
aren't able to represent Debian?
> > Here's an example from a recent thread in debian-devel called "Woody
> > Progress": [...]
> > Manoj Srivastava> "[...] I, personally, work for Debian so that I
> > can have a high quality Linux distribution. Having it useful to
> > other people, espescially people I like, is a neat secondary
> > thing. Am I beholden to the unwashed masses out there? No way."
> >
> > I don't think that public statements like these help Debian.
> Really? I think they do, since they elucidate the motivation
> of at least one developer, and disabuse some of the users out there
> about the demands that they can make; the customer is only always
> right when they are paying customers.
You're telling me that a maintainer has few responsibilities but I
disagree. I think that maintainers always ought to listen to their
users' suggestions.
For example, one thing that really bothers me is the ignorance of many
developers when it comes to localization and internationalization.
Debian is an international project and before someone decides to
maintain a package he or she ought to consider that. Quite often it
happens (not only in Debian) that a maintainer postpones l10n and i18n
bug reports and patches or even ignores them since he considers them
as not important. But a maintainer can't decide that; he may be able
to work with the program, but on my systems the program could be
unusable.
But to come back to the subject, I just wanted to make clear that I
haven't found much difference in the attitudes and the quality of the
work of long-term maintainers and maintainers who recently joined
Debian.
> > In fact, these statements don't comply with Debian's Social
> > Contract which clearly says that "Our Priorities are Our Users and
> > Free Software. We will be guided by the needs of our users and
> > the free-software community. We will place their interests first
> > in our priorities."
> You are confusing the guiding principle of the project itself
> with the motivations of individual developers.If you do not
> understand the distinction, I don't think you understand well enough
> how we work.
How could the whole project comply with the Social Contract if none of
the individual developers honored the users' needs?
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