Re: Some observations regardig the progress towards Debian 3.1
On Sat, 2003-11-15 at 17:42, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> If a maintainer is MIA, his packages should be orphaned and he should
> be kicked out of Debian as soon as possible.
It would be better _not_ to make it a policy to kick a maintainer
out of Debian just because he or she is MIA. Faced with this
prospect, a developer is more likely to cling to packages that he
no longer has time to maintain. (He can do this by remaining visible
while still not really doing anything. This is already a problem.)
Packages should be taken away from deadbeats, but perhaps deadbeats
should be offered some sort of semi-retired status from which they
can return if they find more time to contribute to the project.
As for the problem of retarded releases ... Debian releases about
as fast as it can. The problem is not (as you suggest) that people
don't know how old Woody is; it is (as you also note) that the job
is very big. Incanting the SC won't make additional work happen.
I didn't notice any new ideas in your message about where to find
the additional man hours. (Here is one: Encourage developers to
use the time that they would normally spend fighting flamewars on
debian-* to fixing bugs.) As for dropping packages from a release --
this practice is better than the alternative which is to release
Debian with critically broken packages.
I think that it may be time for Debian to admit that users that
require frequent releases should not expect those releases to come
straight from Debian. They should take a look at one of the fine
distributions based on Debian or else pay someone to make periodic
custom releases that suits their needs.
--
Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>
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