Re: Questions to the candidates
Hello,
Kalle Kivimaa wrote:
What is the role of the DPL? Is he a strong leader, who uses his
position to Get Things Done His Way, a public figurehead, who just
Speaks For The Project, a mediator, who tries to solve internal
squabbles, or something else?
The current role seems to be that the DPL can make things "official",
like a public statement or a delegation. Obviously, there is noone in
the project better suited to do that, but IMO the primary role of the
DPL should be that of the mediator.
Do you feel that the DPL is first and foremost The Debian Project
Leader, in the sense that anything Debian-related the DPL does, he
does so as the DPL, not as a DD or a private person?
Both. Foremost, the position of the DPL is a "hat" that can be put on if
needed, and shouldn't be put on if there is no clear need for it,
however it is also important that the person below the hat still has the
trust and respect of the others. The DPL can only mediate as long as he
is deemed impartial, and this is a highly subjective judgement in which
the wearing or non-wearing of hats only plays a minor role.
There are problems with communication between some key teams and
the rest of the project. What solutions will you try to implement
during the next year?
The best solution I can currently think of would be asking individual
team members in person what is currently going on. The difficulty in
talking to a team is that "everybody" translates to "everybody but me",
so the idea is to point at a specific person and ask for ten or twenty
minutes of their time.
How do you feel about spending Debian monies into buying core
infrastructure support?
Sure, letting the money rot in the bank without a benefit does not make
sense; I also believe that spending the money wisely will result in more
donations coming in. The key word is "wisely", though.
So far, we have mainly bought replacement parts for machines that had
broken down, which is a fairly uncontroversial thing: everybody can see
the necessity of doing that.
I think this is the main issue people have with dunc-tank: By paying
people to perform some task in Debian, we'd effectively acknowledge that
it is necessary to pay them, otherwise we wouldn't. However if this is
the case, then it is not a once-off thing, but will be recurring every
year; claiming otherwise asks the question of why this particular
incident is different and should not be seen as a precedent.
There is a lot of gray area between those extremes, and we have to
decide on a case-by-case basis. I can see Debian spending more money
than it used to (e.g. to get some of the developer machines back up),
but I want to avoid both setting precedent and starting an internal
competition for money (which I've written more about in my platform[0]).
Currently just about every single conversation on -project and
-vote degenerates immediately into a (minor) flame war. What will you
do to fix the current atmosphere?
Step in at the point where everything has been said and people are
merely reformulating their arguments; provide a summary and, if
possible, a compromise solution. Doing that as the DPL gives the summary
enough visibility to be noticed, otherwise it would be just another opinion.
Simon
Reply to: