Re: Proposal for collaborative maintenance of packages
I'm going to dip my spoon into this soup, because I dislike soup, and
this one especially irks me.
pe, 2005-12-30 kello 00:45 +1100, skaller kirjoitti:
> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 03:35 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> > While insiders are not qualified to comment on how outsiders *feel* about
> > the process, they are certainly the people to judge whether the *outcome* of
> > the process is the correct one.
>
> Outcome for their own personal pleasure? No: they're not
> qualified to judge the outcome either: that's a judgement made
> in the market by end users. Based on that Debian is reasonably
> successful .. but way WAY behind Microsoft. Do we really
> want that??
I'm sorry, are you trying to tell me what my goal is? My goal certainly
is not to out-compete Microsoft. I do not accept your definition of
success. I'm not a Debian developer to gain market share, or play other
popularity games. I am a Debian developer because it is fun, and also
because the end result is an operating system I like using.
There are at least a thousand people working on Debian. Everyone has
their own motivation, and the only common goal we have, the goal of the
Debian project, is to create a free operating system. Having a big
market share is nice, but it is not the goal of the project, though
obviously it is a personal goal of many people.
You have talked about feelings, how it feels like to not be able to
upload directly to the Debian archive. Let me say something about how it
feels like when outsiders start ranting about what I as a DD must do
because they want it. It feels bad. I feel exploited. I feel treated
like a resource, in the worst tradition of Henry Ford. It sucks out the
fun of working on Debian.
Please understand this: Debian developers are volunteers, they do it
because it is so much fun that they want to spend their free time on it.
If you suck out the fun, they'll go do something else.
It is not productive at all for you to tell people that you don't want
to do more than a little work to have your software in Debian and
therefore everyone else should do much more work, and worse, do work
that many of them find boring and unpleasant. Reviewing other people's
patches in large quantities every day is something that few people will
be happy to do for more than a few days. After that, they'll figure out
that they could be doing something else, like developing their own
software and have someone else do all the boring, tedious work.
Now, I'm all for making it easy to contribute to Debian. We just need to
do it without making things insecure ("everyone can upload to Debian"),
unpleasant ("DDs must spend all their time reviewing all changes"), or
otherwise detrimental to the project as a whole.
A good, productive way would be to motivate more people to sponsor
packages for people, and to help them learn to do packaging better.
Whining isn't getting anyone motivated, though. I'd be more motivated to
do it for someone had a package that I thought was useful or important,
and they were nice to work with.
Someone who insists that it is my duty to do things for them because I
have gone through the (small!) trouble of learning how Debian packaging
is done, and they have not, deserves no respect, and is rather unlikely
to get help from me.
--
On IRC, we sometimes like to watch silence.
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