Re: Q to all candidates: SWOT analysis
On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 6:25 AM, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
> - Lack of people power in some areas
Which general areas would you say we have a particular need for more people in?
> - Generally, no interest of contributors for non-technical tasks
The amount of translators we have suggests otherwise. Likewise the
amount of themes we got for jessie. The newish recruits to the
publicity team are another exception. I believe there are people
interested in these tasks but most existing contributors are focussed
on technical things so there are issues around getting started and
visibility.
https://www.debian.org/international/
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes
> - Not easy to get started
In terms of packaging stuff, we have an excess of documentation of
different quality, outdatedness and detail. This is a swamp that needs
to be drained. A sprint could be a good way to get this fixed, if
enough people interested in mentors stuff could be found.
In general, debian-mentors seems to answer most questions and almost
all getting started questions, but of course we miss the people who
give up before getting to debian-mentors.
> - Complex processes (or sometimes, not well known)
Undocumented or non-existent processes is something we definitely need
to improve. Complexity also leads to swamps of documentation.
> - No roadmap
How would you propose to set a roadmap?
> Threats:
> - Containers as a solution to deploy applications and services.
I consider this an opportunity; imagine a future where people say
this; go to Debian for your container needs, they produce secure,
security-updated and backport-updated container images for these
tasks/applications/blends. This could expand the amount of people
using Debian in some form and the amount of package maintainers.
> - Non-free hardware more and more common. Even our CPUs require a microcode
> that we are invited update blindly!
OTOH, the wider world is reacting to this and is starting work on
libre ISAs, SoC designs and silicon for that, which represents a
significant opportunity for us to have an official port to a Free CPU
for the first time. There is already an OpenRISC Debian port but
RISC-V/lowRISC seems more likely to have widely available ASICs.
http://riscv.org/
http://www.lowrisc.org/
http://openrisc.debian.net/
> - Complexity of new software stacks: Who's really able to debug his Gnome
> installation and understand all dbus-triggered stuff? It became so much
> complex that even power users have troubles finding answers. And this is
> not an isolated example.
Surely this is just a matter of having debugging tools, knowing they
exist and learning to use them? For D-Bus, there are bustle,
dbus-monitor mdbus2 AFAICT. I certainly wouldn't expect to be able to
debug a C/C++ program without valgrind/GDB/etc, nor a web application
without Firebug or similar.
> Opportunities:
Could you write a bit more about the opportunities?
How can we take advantage of them?
What work do we need to do?
What improvements to Debian could they bring?
> - Potential new contributors from Arabic-speaking countries
I haven't noticed any particular opportunity for this, could you
mention where/how you noticed this?
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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