Frank Küster wrote:
As a DPL candidate, do you feel that such a feeling of uncertainty, and of being at the mercy of somebody you can't talk to, occurs frequently among developers, and if yes, do you think it is a problem for their motivation to do Debian work?
People have all sorts of feelings, some of them rational some of them not. If you're willing to re-imagine that question without all the feelings, then yes, I certainly think that's an actual problem in Debian at the moment.
I also think everyone concerned is already fairly well aware of it, to the point that finding new examples, or new ways of explaining why it's bad isn't terribly useful.
Do you think that the uncertainty about the criteria for accepting or rejecting a new package can make developers to hang on to badly designed old solutions, instead of proposing and implementing/packaging something really new?
I think we could do a better job of documenting the best ways of packaging things. I don't think anything beyond ignorance of what the best way actually is is stopping anyone from implementing really new things though.
If the answer to any of these is yes, do you think the DPL can do anything about it? What?
The DPL shouldn't really /do/ very much per se; but supporting the people who do work on these things is important in itself, in my opinion. I think most people in Debian are community minded enough to find it difficult to work if they don't feel that the project -- as represented by the DPL, by delegates, by fellow developers, by users, whatever -- supports their activities. I think the problems posed by flamewars and off-topic discussions on mailing list are both underestimated and relatively easily fixed; but it's certainly the case that there are similar problems the other way too.
Cheers, aj