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Re: 1 year release good enough.



On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 01:40:36PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> Well put Russ!!!

Fully ACK.
 
> Relative percentage is not that important as long as absolute number is
> positive, which means that fun goes on and our efforts are of
> benefit ;)
> 
> And depending on the audience (field of endeavor, habbits etc)
> statistics might vary [e.g. 1] ;-)
> 
> [1] http://neuro.debian.net/blog/2011/2011-06-27_software_survey.html

I can perfectly confirm this.  From a Debian Med perspective I can say
that while there are some comparable initiatives in Fedora and SuSE
these do not really fly.  Today I had a discussion with a Fedora GSoC
student who sees his work in danger of becoming orphaned because nobody
really cares about his packages of medical software and also SuSE
medical seems to make more annoucements rather than packaging work.  So
my idea is (and sorry for repeating myself over and over) that we can
perfectly dart into specific fields because we are involving experts in
those fields.

The Fedora Medical guy mentioned that there is a lack of management
work.  And I can confirm that this is perfectly what I'm observing in
several Debian internal projects.  To boil it down to some specific
projects I have observed in the last time: Debian Games, Debian
Multimedia, Debian GIS and Debian Enterprise - all these projects (while
potentially targeting at a much larger user base than Debian Med) are
lacking what I would call project management in the sense that people
claim to be busy enough with packaging and do not have time for other
things (like talking to people - upstream and users, telling them how to
become involved and setting specific standards and goals).

I'm pretty sure that if I would have kept on packaging only from the
beginning Debian Med would have way less than 1/3 of its current number
of packages, way less than 1/3 of ist current number of active team
members and way less of users.  Finally it is fun to work in a healthy
team.  So please keep in mind that enhancing Debian is not only adding
packages to a pool but also how to form strong teams around a set of
packages to make the packaging sustainable.  I'm quite convinced that
this strategy will lead to an increasing number of users and that it
is even more important than the frequency of releases.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de


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