On Sun, Mar 12, 2006 at 01:21:28PM -0600, Mike McCarty wrote: > I have endeavored to maintain a helpful tone in this message. > Please forgive me where I may have failed. As more-or-less an > outsider here, I have an observation to make concerning the Debian > distribution, and considerations which might motivate people whether > to chose to use Debian. I hope I am not speaking out of turn. > I hope to encourage introspection. If you choose to read this > message (it's rather long, I'm afraid), then I ask that you > not respond until after reading all of it, and encourage you > to endeavor to maintain a measured tone. > > On a small number of occasions, I have proposed what appeared to me > to be relatively minor modifications to the policies of this mail > list. Each of these has been met by the existence of two already- > formed factions each arguing either for or against my proposal. > > In each case, the intensity and acrimony expressed by each faction > has increased until the thread wasn't worth reading, let alone > contributing to. Eventually, list administration got involved, > expressing a hard-line attitude that the users don't get consideration. Hi Mike, It is noted that Debian is not a Democracy, its closer to a meritocracy. There are many ideas that have been discussed amongst the developers, repeatedly and those in power have concluded what is 'the debian way'. These discussions have been reawakened on this list time and time again. If a discussion reaches a different conclusion from policy and can get some debian developers to agree, I assume that might lead to a change. But these decisions are from people who have experience with large computer networks and million of messages received per day and then are checked against Debian policy and the project goals. Unfortunately these discussions and their resultant decisions are not conveniently summarized in one place for folks to read, it would make this much,much better for users and developers to know how policy was arrived at and it merits. As for help, you get a mixed bag, sometimes ultra-helpful folks and sometimes no response or 'RTFM'. The totally volunteer and world-wide nature of Debian makes it a unique organization: good, bad or otherwise. I have gotten different impressions of people from reading each different mailing list, going in IRC, meeting folks in person and reading blogs. It is not Redhat, as that is a corporation with well defined corporate rules paying taxes and such. Cheers, Kev -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux == | my web site: | | : :' : The Universal | debian.home.pipeline.com | | `. `' Operating System | go to counter.li.org and | | `- http://www.debian.org/ | be counted! #238656 | | my keysever: pgp.mit.edu | my NPO: cfsg.org |
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