Re: Question for all candidates: Care of Core infrastructure
Wouter Verhelst dijo [Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 01:45:33AM +0100]:
> The numbers are easy. The amount of Debian Developers has been
> approximately steady at about 1000 for the past ten years. Over that
> same time, the amount of packages in our distribution has been steadily
> increasing. By definition, that means the ratio of Debian Developers per
> package has been doing down, and thus also that the core infrastructure
> has less contributors. Having more packages does not necessarily mean
> that only fringe packages are added; useful new software is written all
> the time, and the fact that useful new software is written does not make
> useful old software disappear.
>
> I believe the problem is not that less people are interested in Debian's
> core infrastructure; the problem is that less people are interested in
> *Debian*. We need to work on that. As we say in Dutch, "stilstaan is
> achteruitgaan" -- "standing still is the same as going backwards" -- and
> the number of DDs has not been going up for quite a while now.
Umm, yes, but during the seven years I have been part of this project,
we shifted from a collections of mostly solo-maintained to a good
number of team-maintained packages. And we have opened the DM scheme
(imperfect but still much better than not having it IMO), which brings
in important numbers of new contributors.
We have also, via the MIA runs, lowered the number of inactive
developers bloating the numbers.
As of today, we have 891 DDs and 107 DMs (at least as keyring-maint is
aware). That means the MIA runs lowered the numbers by a quite
noticeable ~15% in the last couple of months. And although DDs still
outnumber almost 9:1 DMs, the DM scheme is relatively new; I expect DM
size to grow to be at least the same size as DD (even taking into
account many DMs eventually become DDs).
--
Gunnar Wolf • gwolf@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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