On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 12:47:00PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > As I'm sure you're aware, there is no cabal; there's only a bunch of > people who put in massive amounts of time and get the blame when > important stuff is delayed. And as any sysadmin will tell you, *every* > request is important. > > (that's not to say there's no room for improvement, but calling them a > "cabal" is overdoing it IMHO). I call James Troup and Ryan Murray the cabal because that is the word disapproving DDs have used to name them for a long time. If the word is wrong, then I would gladly learn better language, but it seems that every word used to name them (including their own names, oddly) is somehow regarded by their apologists as objectionable. Such objections exist to silence legitimate debate. As far as putting in massive amounts of time is concerned, I have no idea what James and Ryan are doing with all this time. They don't tell me. What I know is that James and Ryan---the cabal, or whatever you want to call them---exercise tremendous control over the Project. Why the Project continues to submit to their control, I cannot explain. Admittedly, this is an old discussion. You and I are not going to shed any new light on it here. I believe that for several reasons, if elected, you would make a fine DPL. Your platform seems perfectly consistent with your actions over the past years. Both platform and actions are admirable. I do not believe that you stand any realistic chance to succeed in cleaning up the Project's cabal mess, though. [This message regrettably comes just two hours before the end of the DPL campaign period. Wouter ought to be allowed to reply if he wishes. He can have the last word; I'll not answer again. Should Wouter's reply slip past the end of the period, please blame me not him in the matter.] > > Still, there exist many, sometimes contradictory reasons to vote for > > or against a candidate; and, this year, I find a close four-way > > contest at the top of my own ballot. My question to all candidates > > who wish to respond, to resolve the contest: > > > > Please brag about RC bugs you have fixed since sarge's release, > > excluding bugs in your own packages. > > I put in at least a few hours _per day_ for Debian, and only expect to > increase that. Over the last year, I set up and have been maintaining > the box that builds the powerpc d-i dailies; have been doing maintenance > and buildd admin work of between 2 and 7 buildd machines (the number > varied because of system breakdown, mainly; some even have broken down, > were then repaired, and broke down again) for the armeb and m68k > architectures for unstable and (in the case of m68k) experimental; and I > have single-handedly started work on the debian coldfire port. I've also > worked on the d-i port to the m68k architecture (though not in the past > year). > > For my own packages, I've been working with belpic's upstream to get a > reasonably working build system (there's still a lot of work to do in > that area; also, to my horror, they've switched to SCons now), have had > to take over upstream maintenance of nbd since a few years (which sucks > up a rather large amount of time, too), and have had to figure out a > bunch of problems in m68k assembly to be able to figure out what was > wrong with the emile boot sequence (which turned out to be > Debian-specific). > > Currently, I have 15 bugs open (in all) against my packages; this is a > record (I've never had as much open bugs), and this is happening now > mostly because I do not consider any of them important enough to warrant > a release exception at this time, and because some of them require me to > learn new stuff (which will happen eventually, but not just yet). > > Apart from that, I can only "brag" about having tested the fix for #376812 > (grave bug on libglide2 which required hardware that the maintainer did > not have, and which I did) and about having provided fixes for #255457 > (Large File Support for perforate; wishlist), and some other similar > ones. Working on other people's bugs just isn't something I spend a lot > of time on; I take great pride in being a good maintainer of my _own_ > stuff, and I do not feel that it is, or should be, a requirement of any > Debian Developer to work on stuff that is not their responsability. -- Thaddeus H. Black 508 Nellie's Cave Road Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA +1 540 961 0920, t@b-tk.org, thb@debian.org
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