Learning from FreeBSD's mistakes

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

I was recently pointed to this article about some of the problems
facing the FreeBSD community:
    https://lwn.net/Articles/712308/

I found it interesting.

There are very significant parallels between FreeBSD and Debian.

We are both very old projects.  We are both large.  Both Debian and
FreeBSD are (in their own ways) deeply conservative institutions.

In both projects, the group with principal formal responsibility for
resolving technical disputes (FreeBSD core and the Debian TC) always
wants to act with consensus and responds only very slowly.

I hope we do much better than FreeBSD in our response to harassment.
In Debian the response to such problems is separate from technical
decisionmaking, which is good.  In Debian there is no single team
responsible for responding to harassment problems, and the skills and
resources of the different teams and different people vary.

I think we have *mostly* got over the idea that we should highly value
a developer who makes big technical contributions in key areas, but
whose relationships with others are poor.  (I do like the way the
article reframes "rockstar" as someone with too big an ego...)

A key difference is that Debian development is much more fragmented
(or compartmentalised, if you will).  This means that much of the time
one does not need to deal with Debian as a whole - only with *much*
smaller subprojects.  Most of those subprojects work well.  But if
they don't, you can't fork them (which is what you might do with a
broken project otherwise), so you're back to dealing with the
project-wide institutions.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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