Re: Questions for all candidates
Le Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 12:59:15PM -0700, Bdale Garbee écrivait:
> hertzog@debian.org (Raphael Hertzog) writes:
>
> > 1. master.debian.org is still running potato. What do you think about
> > that ?
>
> As long as we continue to support security updates for potato, I'm not
> concerned about it.
Unfortunately I am. Since the first day that the PTS web interface
has been running, it runs on my own machine and the content is rsynced
to master several times a day. A couple of features are also disabled
because of that ... (cf the notice at the bottom of each page of the
PTS)
At the beginning, I kindly asked when master will be upgraded and nobody
could give me an answer ... I asked several times in order to put
some incentive and nothing changed. Then I proposed to recompile the
required packages for potato so that they could get installed on
master.debian.org and they declined this offer as well ...
So basically I'm stuck. I don't want to blame anyone for this problem
but I just want to show you that I reached the limit of what I could
do and that I have absolutely no fallback solution.
This is just a single case of a problem, maybe not enough to worry about
but I can show you other examples which causes similar troubles :
- you want to create a new subproject but the listmaster will take
way too much time to create the list you need to go further
- a cvs repository not created by debian-admin but you feel it's
important to have this repository hosted on an official debian
site (because it's for debian-edu for example)
> > 2. If you're regularly in contact with debian-admin or ftpmasters or
> > some other important team, you will have faced rejection of ideas or
> > requests, and if you criticize them because of that, you may get an
> > answer like "bingo, I'll never do anything for you in the upcoming
> > year". What do you think about such an answer ?
>
> Actually, that hasn't been my experience at all.
You're really lucky. :-)
> I've had our listmasters tell me there was a better way to do
> something than what I was asking for, I've done stupid things on
> debian.org machines that someone in the admin team had to come clean
> up, and I've uploaded packages that our ftpmasters bounced because I'd
> missed something in a license or done something else weird. I don't
> ever recall feeling that I had been treated worse than I deserved.
I've had debian-admin refusing to create me a CVS repository because
it's too much work for them and I should better wait for
the Debian Sourceforge (codenamed alioth.debian.org). And they have been
refusing to create CVS repositories for several months because of that.
I replied that creating a repository is a 10 minute work and that they
should consider appoint new people if they can't take 10 minute for
helping DebianEdu which needs this repository. And I said too much ...
I was faced with an answer like I presented above.
Of course, I'm used to those answers now and I know that I can still
count on everyone for other requests but the fact is that you can't
always be sure of what you can expect from the people who are in
charge of some important tasks. They'll happily take 10 minutes to
install you the required packages for helping you to setup the PTS but
they won't take 10 minutes to create a CVS repository.
In fact, I can understand that but I can't approve the way it is done.
It's not the time that is problematic, it's the fact that installing yet
another cvs repository is boring and they already decided to never create
any new CVS repository and to remove this burden from their shoulder by
using SF/Debian. Ok, that's fine, but please then they should tell it to
everyone ... and stop telling to people that 10 minutes is too much
work for them who are spending many hours each week. They're just
frustrating people with such answers ...
Okay, that has not much to do with the election, but this is a real
concern ... I tried to expand to the general case based on my personal
experience. Feel free to comment on it if you think that you can add
some more perspective to the problem that I exposed.
I have the feeling that the leader should be concerned by those cases
where volunteers are unintentionnaly blocked in their contribution to
Debian.
> I regret that I have not yet met James in person... but I talk to him fairly
> regularly on IRC and occasionally via email, and find him quite reasonable
> to discuss things with. He does an amazing amount of good work for Debian
> behind the scenes.
And yet he would never advertise his work. Don't you feel that you
should tell everyone what he's doing so that people stop ranting
about him ? And so that people know a bit better how the DAM really
works and so on ...
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com
Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
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