Re: Question for all candidates: inter-dependancy of works the growing Debian project.
Hi Moritz, hi Marc.
I started to wonder about modularity in the use of the Debian
infrastructure in 2006, because of a problem with the clustalw package.
As you can see on the graph, its popcon score started to decrease around
july. (http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=clustalw)
I found out that it correlated with a bug whose fix was kept in unstable
because it was not built on some arches (clustalw is non-free). This was
a frustrating experience: I had strong evidence that we were losing
users and it took me many hours of efforts to get it built on the
missing arches, on which I have never had heard of anybody using
Clustal. The popcon scores restarted to increase shortly after a
re-upload with version bump triggered the release.net autobuilders.
There is something interestign in this example: it shows the case of
alternative services offered to a package maintainer (although one is
not official). Both have similar functions, but their requisites are not
the same (building non-free on official autobuilders is not allowed).
When I talk about componentisation, I simply mean that the fate of a
package could be the result of multiple bilateral agreements between
teams. If there is build team A and build team B, then the package
maintainer could collaborate with one or the other. It is not necessary
competition: Debian will in the future release team S, release team B,
release team V, like Stable, Backports, Volatile. For security support,
the Security team has very high standards that do not necessary fit all
packages (see the wordpress controversy for instance). Having either
alternative security teams or schemes like "upgrade" or "best efforts"
would allow to better fit upstream's strategy for instance.
I hope I made myself a bit clearer. Finally, "Opt-out" is a negative
concept that does not describe so well what I wanted to say. If I could
summarise in a few words, it would be "sharing the responsability
between the package maitainer and the Debian infrastructure teams".
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wakō, Saitama, Japan
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