Re: Please appoint one new person to the DSA Team
Mike Bird <mgb-debian@yosemite.net> writes:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 22:06, Anthony Towns wrote:
>> It would also be helpful if there were people who are able to
>> commit time to do significant but boring tasks to help DSA, expecting
>> neither praise, acknowledgement or, most importantly, any additional
>> rights/priveleges in return. If that's you please mail me privately,
>> probably at leader@d.o.
> Anthony,
> I spend part of my time maintaining a few dozen Linux systems in a
> variety of flavors. I see that Debian also maintains a few dozen
> Linux systems[1]. There are people around who maintain hundreds
> or even thousands of Linux systems.
[questions snipped]
I'm not sure this helps. The difficulty of administering sytsems depends
mostly on the complexity and frequency of tasks needed rather than the
number of systems. It can *easily* take longer to maintain a half-dozen
machines than 500 depending on what the systems are used for. And a lot
of public discussion of just what has to be done, very unfortunately,
tends to devolve into debates about whether this or that should be done by
people who aren't in a position to help one way or the other. Bikeshed
painting is a very common phenomenon on public mailing lists.
I'm grateful for Anthony posting a direct call for volunteers (and
debian-devel-announce might be an even better place for such a call). I
can't respond to it personally since I just picked up a Debian Policy
delegation and don't yet know how much time I will have free. If you can,
please do.
Everyone involved in this has the best interests of Debian at heart. I
firmly believe that. Everyone is trying to move the project forward as
best they can, the best way to help is to share the load of the work that
needs to be done, and the more people are involved in doing the work, the
better the communication will get *naturally*.
I don't think it serves any more purpose to get angry at people being
frustrated than it does to be angry at the existing DSA team. What we
need is to get more people involved, spread the load, and reduce the
stress, tension, and lack of good will. Anthony's earlier messages on
this thread didn't, to me, seem to be directly helping that. His most
recent message was, again in my opinion, better. It provides some
direction forward that isn't just rebuking people for being understandably
frustrated and trying to break roadblocks by force of will.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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