Re: Question for candidate Towns [Was, Re: DPL election IRC Debate - Call for questions]

[Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > (I'm not suggesting that the ftp-masters are doing their job
> > > inadequately here,
> > See, that's the thing, you _are_. You can tell, because you had to 
> > explicitly refute the idea; it's the same as being able to tell you're 
> > being offensive when you feel the need to say "no offense intended". And 
> > sometime's that's necessary; but it's happening _continually_, which is 
> > just tiresome and demotivating.
> No. I don't believe that the ftp-masters are doing their job
> inadequately.

I didn't say you believed it -- I said you were suggesting it. Which is 
worse, because it's not something that can be addressed straight up, 
because you'll just say "But that's not what I /meant/". But how else do 
you think "Oh, NEW's not being processed! There's not enough 
communication. And we need to work out how to deal with inadequate 
teams, anyway." is going to appear to anyone at all? Heck -- any rumours 
that the NEW is deliberately stopped because of the release presumably 
started when that was explicitly denied by the RM; how much easier is it 
for your sequence of thoughts to get misconstrued to "I think 
ftp-masters are doing their job inadequately and must be 
retrained/replaced." ?

> However, that doesn't mean that we should ignore any
> situation where a team /does/ do their job inadequately.

That doesn't mean we should ignore the possibility of aliens orbiting 
the planet trying to hack their way into Debian, either.

Are there any teams doing their job "inadequately"? If not, shouldn't 
the whole issue be treated the same as the space aliens one, who I 
presume we're confident don't exist either? If there are teams doing 
their job inadequately -- and you've explicitly said you don't think 
that's the case for ftpmaster -- why are you attaching this discussion 
to one about ftpmaster?

If you don't think ftpmaster is the most inadequate team in Debian at 
present, why are you contributing to the false perception that they are 
by participating in this thread?

> At what point
> do we (as a project) step in and do something, and how do we deal with
> that sort of situation without demotivating other teams? I think these
> are difficult questions, but I think we need to find answers to them.

At what point do you see sufficient requests from a team for support, 
and respond to them?

> > Not really -- the question then becomes "How do you get that 
> > consensus?", and that's hard -- if it weren't we'd have already replied 
> > "REJECT: Your package has these problems, please fix them." The 
> > question's then immediately, "How do we deal with the followup 
> > question?" and there's no real answer to that.
> Telling people that there is inadequate consensus about a package means
> that they can either accept that they're not going to get that
> consensus, or alternatively start doing something about gaining that
> consensus.

No, then they'd start mailing lists asking for "support" -- which isn't 
gaining consensus or resolving the underlying issues. What needs to 
happen is the underlying problems need to be brought to light, then 
addressed directly: the problem here is that the underlying problems 
aren't even clearly known in the first place. And the package 
maintainers are usually the /worst/ people to be doing this, because by 
the fact that they've decided its worth packaging, they've usually 
already concluded, explicitly or implicitly, that the problems aren't 
worth taking seriously.

> Failing to tell them that just leaves them puzzled. It's not
> the job of the ftp-masters to gain that consensus, but I think it
> /should/ be their responsibility to tell people that they don't think it
> exists.

Do you think explaining that should take priority over the activities 
ftpmaster are currently prioritising, and if so, which ones?

For comparison helping the crypto-in-main team get a consensus about 
that problem took something like three or four months of my time as 
RM/ftpmaster -- and that was with explicit support and activity from the 
DPL, a team of people working on the problem, and a lawyer whom we could 
contact fairly easily.

> > It'd be possible to prioritise increased communication, but that's YA 
> > thing to do, leaving less time for even the things that're currently 
> > being done.
> Sure. How can that be improved?

Well, here's a simple train of thought:

 (1) Hrm, ftpmaster aren't doing things as quickly as normal.
 (2) Gosh, that probably means they're really busy.
 (3) I wonder what I could do that would help.

Here's a train of thought that doesn't work so well:

 (1) Hrm, ftpmaster aren't doing things as quickly as normal.
 (2) Not that that's very quick anyway.
 (3) Why the hell isn't there an explanation somewhere about the change
     somewhere?
 (4) Oh, that's right, because they're in the Cabal and don't care about
     us peons. Bastards.
 (5) GAR! What can I do to make them hurry up and do what I want?

> I've no grudge against ftpmaster.

Then how about doing the courtesy of not using ftpmaster as a perfect 
opportunity to discuss "inadequate teams"?

Cheers,
aj