Re: Question for Gustavo and Sam: bringing back the fun
On 3/15/07, Sam Hocevar <sam@zoy.org> wrote:
My main approach to make it fun again to work on Debian is to
reduce the frustration. You cannot have fun doing something if your
contributions are ignored, if you cannot access the resources you need
to do the work, if your administrative requests are postponed because
there are more urgent matters, and if you do not know what is going on
and why.
Agreed, you can't. But even if all of these were fixed (and none are
easy to fix, anyway), that does not guarantee that everyone will start
having fun.
From my own point of view, there are several things that currently
make things not fun, which are not listed in your platform:
1) flamewars: the constant bickering on mailing list is depressing, it
takes away a lot of time, and it gives the whole project a bad
reputation.
2) bad maintainers "owning" packages (i.e. not being able to help out
packages that are bad shape, because only RC or important bugs should
be NMUed). Thus, we see patches for "normal" bugs rotten in the BTS
for years. This is depressing too.
3) reluctancy to change how we do things. There are a lot of DDs that
have a "We are the best distribution ever, we shouldn't change
anything" attitude. We are being left behind. All the other distros
are improving, renewing, adding extra stuff, and we are still doing
the same things.
4) jealousy, bitterness, envy, and other feelings like that among DDs.
If we just stopped the personal attacks and started concentrating on
what we like (free software, I assume we all like that), then we could
have much more fun.
5) (this should taken with a grain of salt) length of releases.
About this last point, I'm all for stable and good releases, but I'd
like to quote some parts of Ian Murdock's "founding" message [0]
(...)
1) Debian will be sleeker and slimmer.
2) Debian will contain the most up-to-date of everything.
3) Debian will contain a installation procedure that doesn't need to be babysat;
(...)
That, along the other points included in that mail, was the outline of
a distribution that would be "fun". He proposed a distribution that
was good technically, that was up-to-date, that was easy to use, and
was nicer.
I don't have any magical solution, but I do feel that as we went for
the "Debian will be stable and robust and secure" goal, we left behind
a lot of the other goals. Can we be stable, robust and secure, and
still be sleeker, easy to use and up-to-date ?
I think that would be a great help into making Debian more fun (at
least for me).
[0]: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.development/msg/a32d4e2ef3bcdcc6?output=gplain
--
Besos,
Marga
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