Re: how informed should a DPL be?
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 09:46:30PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> Recent threads have made me concerned about how well informed some of
> our current DPL nominees are about what is going on within Debian.
>
> My question to the candidates is similar to what I asked in 2010[1]:
>
> How well informed should a DPL be about the activity of the Debian project?
Very. If it's the DPL's job to take the lead in things, then that
requires him to know what he's leading. You can't lead with a blindfold.
> Do you feel you are sufficiently informed about the Debian project?
"sufficiently" is a fairly subjective term.
Yes, I think I know a fair deal of the goings-on in many parts of the
project.
No, I don't think I know all the DPL needs to know. Yet. This is because
I am not the DPL. Yet. As such, I'll have a lot of getting-up-to-speed
to do.
I do believe, however, that I know enough to get started. I am also
someone who can learn easily if I put my mind to something; this is a
useful skill, I think, for a DPL.
> What might be some deficiencies in your understanding of Debian?
I've been involved with many parts of the project, but there are even
more parts of the project that I've not been involved in. Logically,
there are therefore some parts in Debian that I'm not very familiar
with.
However, I do tend to follow things in Debian fairly well, through the
fact that I'm subscribed to numerous mailinglist, am a regular on IRC,
and also read Planet Debian fairly often; and as such I do tend to know
a thing or two even about the things that I'm not directly involved in.
> How would you improve that if you were to be elected?
One of the first things I plan to do is actively reach out to some of
our core teams, to coordinate with them and make sure any gaps in my
current knowledge are filled as soon as possible.
> Same questions for Debian's relationship with the wider free software
> world and with the wider world in general.
I believe I have a good enough understanding of what issues there are
between Debian and other free software projects, but there may be more
'gaps' here. That isn't necessarily a problem, however; it's the DPL's
job to lead the Debian project, not the free software world in general.
As to the 'wider world', that's such a vague concept that it's going to
be fairly difficult to formulate an intelligent answer to that. I do
think there are some issues in the area of vendors (hardly any hardware
manufacturers provide official support for Debian), and we may have a
bit of a problem with name recognition, but that's about it.
--
The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by
the following formula:
pi zz a
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