Re: Candidate questions/musings
Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> Yes, it is. And Debian's response to that was unpleasant enough that
> Bruce decided to leave two or three times. That other people don't
> want to put up with that degree of unpleasantness and choose to
> "coordinate" instead of "lead" shouldn't be particularly surprising.
Well, I'm sure it's not easy. OTOH, Bruce also left the OSI in a
similar way, no? Could be it's not entirely Debian...
> Getting sidetracked by a technical discussion would be such a pity,
> wouldn't it?
> In any event, there are other directions we can go here; the one in
> which I'd like to travel is to have testing be treated as a real
> distribution: one that's installable, and that's fully
> supported. Unfortunately that's also not a direction in which
> Debian's really been willing to be lead, and since it's not
> something I can do alone, it hasn't happened. People are plenty
> willing to come up with their own ideas like you've just done, or to
> express what they'd like to have happen, but actually following
> through on the not-so-fun bits doesn't tend to happen so much.
Sounds good to me. This is the kind of thing I would like to see our
leader pushing.
> It's often said that people get involved in open source development
> because of the reputation they can build up -- doing stuff as DPL
> seems to result in nothing better than "nice, competent
> guy". Motivating, no?
Hey, please don't twist it. I honestly mean that - it's not a
backhanded compliment, and like I said, my memory is fuzzy (I have a
raging case of the flu) and I was going more on what stood out in my
mind, which of course is quite subjective.
> > Hrm. I think there's some truth to that. Debian has a lower
> > average maturity level than other projects, because it's easier to
> > get involved.
> If it were mostly newbies at fault, that'd be one thing, but it
> really isn't. You've been around longer than I have, but can't seem
> to think of anything nice to say about anything the last few DPLs
> have done, eg.
Actually I said a lot of nice words about them, and added that in my
mind, most of them don't stand out for anything they've done as DPL.
They've all been active people who deeply care about Debian, but I
guess my question is... when they got handed that baton, what did they
do with it? Martin and Bdale stand out in my mind as having done an
excellent job of representing Debian, but that's not as important as
other things for me. We're talking about me here, ok?:-)
> Craig Sanders has been around longer than both of us, I think, and
> has been cited as being pretty immature quite recently.
Well what do you think it is then? And how can it be fixed?
> Personally, I don't think it's a problem that the DPL should be
> solving, I think it's a problem the developers need to resolve
> ourselves.
I can certainly agree that we need to make an effort to treat one
another civilly. I wonder why Debian seems worse off than other
project in this regard though? I don't see this much acrimony in
other more or less important free software groups I'm involved with.
--
David N. Welton
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