On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 11:27:17PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
As is probably obvious, I have a tendency to answer questions that
interest me, whether they were intended rhetorically or not.
> > First: "The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made
> > common cause to create a free operating system."
> [...] Imagine Debian as simply a collection of bits sitting on a box
> somewhere. No Project machines. No mailing lists. No BTS. No
> keyring. No master archive. No mirrors. How easy would it be to
> pursue our purpose then?
The alternative extreme would be to imagine we had a bunch of project
machines, a bunch of mailing lists, a state of the art BTS, a keyring,
tonnes of donated project machines, a mirror network, dozens of machines
setup to do automatic building and testing of packages every day... but
no actual software we can give users to install.
I'd think the former hypothetical project would be far more useful
to potential users, and have better achieved our goals than the
latter. Certainly it's fairly easy to go from a good collection of bits
to a viable and useful distribution: Knoppix has done so, for example.
Equally certainly, getting the bits in the first place is non-trivial.
> You tell me -- are issues other than technical ones important at all?
I'd've thought it was obvious that I find issues other than those that
directly affect users important; I have and do spend a bunch of time
working on those sorts of issues, after all. But I think it's especially
important for people who do do that to remember that the important
job isn't working on the processes, it's working on packages. It's
so important because, I believe, we have to ensure that all the time
and energy we spend working on process stuff pays off in improving our
operating system more than if we'd just worked around the bad processes,
and hacked on code.
Especially given that all the candidates seem devoted to working on
process issues rather than our operating system itself, it's important to
me to know whether they share that recognition. Unfortunately, just asking
doesn't work, since it's traditional for candidates up for election to
recognise every concern that's put before them as enormously important,
whether that will actually mean anything later or not.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we could.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature