Re: Question for all candidates: inter-dependancy of works the growing Debian project.
Charles Plessy wrote:
> Although I am not yet a DD, as it can happen anytime before or after the
> elections, I would like to ask a question to the candidates.
>
> Debian is growing bigger everyday. I would like to know if you think
> that it should adapt to its new size, and if yes, how can you help this
> process as a DPL.
Debian needs to adapt to its bigger size.
Aside from the "more people" aspect covered in the platform
technical solutions also help us to scale better. An example is
the 5000 node cluster, which allows archive-wide QA rebuilds within
half a day or the Debian Security Tracker, which is a tremendous
help in organising security work. Some improvements may not even
be visible to the outside: E.g. Anthony implemented a security
advisory template mechanism for dak, which saves 15-20 minutes of
annoying grunt work for each DSA, which results in roughly ten man
days being "freed" for security updates per year.
Often people in core positions are too busy to implement such
improvements on their own, so it's also important to identify
such bottlenecks and coordinate them to people offering help.
> In particular, I would like to know what you think about how the work of
> each DDs and teams are tied, and if the ties should get stronger or
> looser.
The ties should become more loose. The Debian Perl Group is a brilliant
example of a team scaling to several hundred packages, while delivering
more quality than the same set of packages maintained by lots of
people individually could offer.
> Debian offers a lot of features, in particular security support,
> stable releases, and portage on multiple architectures. For some of
> them, alternatives exist: for instance in some conditions, the preferred
> way to distribute a package will be through the debian volatile project
> rather than through the stable releases.
That is mostly a technical decision; the maintainer should be the best
to judge.
An integration of backports.org into official Debian will help provide
additional choice for our users as well. This is definitely solvable
from both the security perspective and I don't expect problems from
the FTP master perspective either.
> Can we imagine a more componentised Debian distribution, in which it
> would be the common responsability of the packagers and the service
> managers to opt in or opt out the use of each services by Debian
> packages (or preferably groups of them)? If yes, how would you define
> the role of the DPL in implusing these changes?
I don't understand the question, could you concretize? Do you mean
a package should be exempted from security support or a stable release
on request of it's maintainer? We already have this right now.
Cheers,
Moritz
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