Re: Questions for all candidates: role models part two
On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 09:35:11AM -0500, Clint Adams wrote:
> In the context of the Debian community, do you feel that you are
> currently a good role model?
Pretty decent. I prefer to work on cool projects, to scratch my itches,
I tell my friends how good Debian is, and I try to not participate or
even launch flamewars[1]. And I'm almost always positive :).
> To which aspects of your behavior should people aspire?
Keep the fun in doing things, and when you do something, do your best to
make it very good, instead of merely adequate.
> Which aspects of your behavior should people eschew?
It's hard, but try to be realistic when you'll get around to doing task
X. I've been mailing with a lot of people as part of the MIA effort, and
there are only *very* few people who don't suffer from this. For nearly
all people, Debian work is done in spare time, so real life can prevent
you from working on it, and at any time, more urgent things crop up.
It's hard to calculate for all those factors, plus it requires courage
to admit you really don't have the time to do this (probably fun or
rewarding, otherwise you'd be glad to give it away) thing.
Getting out of denial phase is the first step :).
Personally, I'm managing quite fine on this subject now, by being
reasonably picky in things I pick up, and prioritizing tasks. The most
important thing is to ensure you're never alone doing one specific task
-- not only do you then have a single point of failure, but it's also
less fun -- what can beat working together on some problem? To take a
recent example, as you probably all noticed, packages.d.o was in need of
some serious code optimizations. Now there wasn't a lack of *quantity*
in help offered, dozens of people contacted me (I wrote a mail
explaining it was down), including people with tips on how to optimize
MySQL (packages.d.o never used a DBMS). So I ended up contacting Frank
Lichtenheld, and we're now working on the code together, and at least
for myself I can say, that every I see a commit coming by, I feel
inspired to also fix some issues, and I know that if I break stuff,
Frank quite quickly cleans up my mess :).
Oh, and:
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir
de la faire plus courte.
-- Blaise Pascal
> How important is it to avoid being a hypocrite?
About this important: |--------------------|
--Jeroen
[1] Scud launches involve flames and are used in wars, hence the 'try
to'. The name was an accident, sorry :)
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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