David Nusinow wrote: > Well, given that the number of actual Debian Developers who hang around > in there regularly is two (Laurence Lane/ljlane and David Harris/ElectricElf) and neither is in > there that frequently these days in my experience. joshk is there from > time to time, but I feel like I'm the only one with a package in the > archive who's actually present frequently and for long periods of time. > Basically there is no help from those officially involved in the > project, which is unfortunate in my opinion. > > Instead what has happened is that bitter users have largely taken over > the channel, mwilson being the most notable of those, and they tend to > piss off more new users than they help. There are very notable > exceptions to this (Rob Weir/bob2, Peter Samuelson/peterS, Don > Armstrong/dondelelcaro, Simon Raven/simonrvn) but they are often drowned > out by the angry users. > > I think that having #debian as an official resource should not go away. > There is no better way to find out what users on the frontline are > having troubles with. The problem is a lack of involvement from people in > the project who are well connected to what's going on. I've thought > about creating a "#debian strike force" for a while now (we almost have > one in a way) but I haven't figured out a good way to do it. If anyone > is interested in setting this up, I think it'd be worthwhile. #debian > should still remain a part of the project. I used to hang out in #debian (oh, 7 or 8 years ago), and I would still like to hang out with some users and help with certian specific issues on irc, but the volume of the current channel is often overwhelming to me, I just can't keep up with the flood, and 90% of it is chatter and/or questons I don't want to bother with. (The same is often true of one of the #debian-devel's too, FWIW.) You just can't get 660 people in an irc channel and have it be generally usable, IMHO. Anyway, something we've done for d-i is tried to redirect users who are having installation problems specifically with d-i to #debian-boot, which is much lower volume, and full of people (though often absent hacking/sleeping) who are knowledgeable about the problems. I wonder if #debian could be split up in more ways, and become more of a redirector channel, possibly even not open to general discussion. There could be a #debian-talk for that. I feel that there is often not enough interaction between our developers and our users. debian-user has several active developers on it, but a very small fraction of the project as a whole, and irc is worse. -- see shy jo
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