Hi Gunnar, On 01/22/2015 03:35 AM, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > First of all: Yes, this is the right forum. At least, this is *the* > forum we currently keep an eye on and start acting on account > retirement notices. Usually, account retirements posted here get > processed first by keyring-maint (Jonathan McDowell, Daniel Kahn > Gillmor and myself). We then either transfer or open a relevant > ticket to DSA. I think you misunderstood my question. :-) I was wondering if it is the right forum to discuss the amount of retirements seen with the reason being "not enough time for Debian". Apparently debian-private was not the right forum, which is why this ended up on -project which is fine with me. > Second, yes, the retirement trend is public: We talked about its > inavoidability back in DC14, and I posted several times on my blog > about it. The last one is at: > > http://gwolf.org/node/4022 I did not see this before your email. Thanks for the all the details in that blog post. I am happy that the number of retirements is not as big as I had the impression: 34 retirements is way less than I was expecting. > involvement, I do know many of the retirees personally. It is, as I > have posted here, animically(?) hard to prompt so much people for > action and get all those retirement messages. We "lost" 34 people in > the last six months! I would not have wanted to take up that task. Thanks for all the work! > viewpoints. And yes, maybe (but that'd fuel a different discussion) > Debian is less attractive in general to the young developer population > to what it was in the past — I don't remember where I read that the > median birth year of DDs has remained almost constant, which means > that (yes) we might be attracting more senior developers (after all, > Linux is no longer just a toy), but also... That we are failing to > attract young talent. That was my impression as well. OTOH I think that's not only for Debian internal reasons but also because more people are just consuming technology today, partly because it got easy to do that. There is a swing in the other direction so, as Arduino, Rasberry Pi etc. are showing. So I hope this also leads to more new Debian developers in the future. > >> * do you have the impression that Debian wants only contributors that >> consistently spend many hours for Debian each month? > I really hope not. My time allocation from Debian varies wildly, and > it often reaches zero. Happy to hear that I am not alone :-) >> * is there something that can be changed to make it less time >> consuming to be a good citizen (like better ways to keep up with >> relevant discussions)? > I try to do that, at least. It's a very passive way of participating, > but at least I "lurk" (and post very seldom) on ~10 mailing lists > (including -devel, -project and -private) and idle on a couple of IRC > channels. That allows me to feel the pulse of the project and catch > many of the erupting topics. I am subscribed to about 10 Debian mailing lists but can hardly follow more than a few discussions a week. Therefore my mailbox is filled with unread Debian email. My sieve filters sort every list into an extra mail folder, but it would be much easier to read via some NNTP interface. I do not know of any though. I think Debian lists are forwarded to UseNet but it is not as easy as years ago to get a good UseNet server. Perhaps somebody has some hints where to follow discussions on Debian lists without storing all that extra mail. >> * does the concept of "the package maintainer" assign too much >> responsibility, putting too many eggs in a single basket? (Freezing >> a package if $maintainer goes MIA, stopping other contributors from >> moving Debian forward)? > I think we have collectively done a great job of slowly moving over to > shared maintenance. Again, I don't have the numbers handy, but > remember having read it. Where? :-) I added myself to the LowNMU threshold list in wiki after writing the original email. collab-maint is also a good thing. But somehow Debian still feels like many small islands to me. Perhaps it is just me though. > And yes, I do hope every DD should at some > point have all of their packages group-maintained and sit on the > low-NMU-threshold list. 100% agreement. Greetings, Torsten
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