Re: Candidate questions/musings
On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 03:38:52PM +0100, David N. Welton wrote:
> 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.
I think the difference is that Debian doesn't encourage people with
fundamental disagreements to go elsewhere in quite the same way other
projects do. Some do it by having forks and competing projects: if
you disagree with how the BSDs are run, you choose a different one or
switch to Linux and keep doing the same thing, on pretty close to the
same software. If you like working on distros like Debian, there's not
that many other places you can go; most of them don't really accept
volunteer contributions, though gentoo and fedora have changed that a bit.
And the other side of it seems to me to be that we are completely out of
the habit of saying "No, those views aren't acceptable in this project.
Goodbye.", which means there's no risk to being acrimonous, and given
it often gets you and your ideas more attention, some benefit.
One of the things Bruce did (before my time, I think) was ban people from
the lists, or convert them to "daily digest mode" for not acting with
an appropriate amount of decorum. I can't imagine a DPL getting away
with trying that now, but I also can't imagine any chance of improving
the environment of the lists without the possibility of resorting to
something like that.
But seriously, there's a whole range of things we could start encouraging
people to work on, and integrating into our development structure. We
could start doing Live CDs a la Knoppix for stable and testing, or we
could do security support for testing, or we could do better automated
testing, or provide better documentation for things, or lots of other
stuff. But mostly, the people who seem to be willing to do the work to
get those things done don't need the leadership and'll do it themselves,
and the calls for assistance tend to go pretty much unanswered, whether
the excuse ends up being "oh, I don't care much about that myself" or
"that seems like a lot of work" or "eh, maybe tomorrow".
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
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