Re: still more questions for the candidates
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> I see. As a tech ctte member, I would be interested in knowing
> how I contribute to this state of "mostly not working". Are we all at
> fault? Some of us are? Which ones? What can be done to address this
> issue?
Will, I don't agree with the particular criticisms that have been
made, and they were certainly expressed far more strongly than I would
be comfortable with.
Still, I think the tech-ctty has been a little too reticent to get
involved in things. I think a wonderful role can be had by having the
tech ctty pay attention and say things like: "Hey, you developers need
to get together and solve this problem; let us know if we can be of
assistance". An example where this would have been helpful was in
fixing the conflicts between gdm, kdm, xdm, etc. This took way longer
than necessary, because the maintainers were mostly content to let a
pessimal status quo persist. I would have like to see the tech-ctty
say "Hey, this really *is* an interoperational problem, please work
together and fix it", but instead my recollection is that there was a
long time where the maintainers simply denied there was any problem at
all.
That is, the tech-ctty seems to have taken its role to be only a very
last resort when everything is breaking in some situation, but that
can be way too late to get involved. I think a little gentle, and
carefully worded, persuasion can be valuable. We need a group whose
job is thinking about general interoperability issues on a more than
one-package-at-a-time basis, and especially when such issues are being
ignored by the developers, or handled with very dragged feet, it would
be nice to see the tech-ctty apply a little encouragement.
Nothing heavy handed, just a kind of general thing.
Thomas
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