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Q: Do you believe in Supercow?



Hello DPL Candidates and fellow party-people,


Debian's favorite package manager little sweet APT turned 21 today[0]
and while looking into collecting stats for the 2019 update of the "APT
for DPL Candidates"[1] article as stats about the prospective DPLs seem
to be in demand[2] I had to wonder if the DPL candidates wanted to take
the opportunity to "perhaps" "make" "nice" and "good" comments "maybe"
about "absolutely" "valuable" "foss" "software" or on "ways" one "might"
"focus" "work" on to "help" "make" "something" to "believe" in "easier".


You see, while researching for the update I noticed that you all have
roughly the same standing as minor contributors¹ to apt which means that
at the moment everything could happen in the election.
In other words: Now is a good opportunity to sacrifice your Amulet of
Yendor at the altar of Supercow to ascent to the DPL throne!
Assuming you are believing in our almighty Supercow of course.


Mindless sweet talk might be boring through, so let me get some (wordy)
questions you can dwell on as much as you like (to improve stats[2]):

1. I said you all mostly qualify as minor contributors, but that is
based mostly on contributing in bugreports more than a decade ago.
You are in good company through: I am the newbie in the fellowship of
the cow even through I am only a few weeks away from my 10 year
anniversary!  Do you have any opinion on why it might be that way?
Or better yet, an idea on how to change that?

2. There are glimmers of dissatisfaction hidden between "bikesheds",
"curl|sudo bash" and mentions of heretic tools like npm/yarn/cargo/….
Given a timemachine, infinite funds and unquestioned management powers,
what would you have made APT developers do one/two/five/ten/twenty years
ago to make you happy now?

3. The package managers of the day of the languages of the day always
seem to have a billion active contributors, hundreds of "nether knew
I couldn't live without them before" features and are all around just
great. Expect that they have this annoying problem solved by apt
years ago, but all the advocates haven't realized it (yet). What is it?

4. There is always the lingering question if Debian might become more or
less important in the future, but asking you that seems unfair as most
of you will not have a crystal ball. So my more realistic and totally
technically objective question is: Do you believe APT will be more or
less important (within Debian) in the future?

5. Using the timemachine from before we move all past, present & future
APT team members to a room on the 1st April 2040. How large do we need
to make that bikeshed and what color will it have? And while we are
talking bikeshed: What will be the major discussion points there?

6. Have you mooed today?
(or as I am asking about the 1st: Have you smashed some milk today?)

7. I would have liked to give you 21 questions, but a ⅓ of that seems
fine & I don't want to take too much of your time – and Supercow and
I have some partying to do, so perhaps you have (half of) an answer
already prepared you want to share with us but nobody has managed to
ask the right question yet (so that the next apt release will be
a botnet calculating the question)?


[I am of course 100% serious and expect as much in return given that
 it will show your voters how well you are equipped to deal with poor
 attempts at humor and uninspired interview questions from the press]

Moo Moo Moo,

David Kalnischkies

¹ the jury is still out on Mr. Carter given there is not a single record
of him on deity@, but he made a video about APT and talked to a high-
priest of Supercow at DebConfs so he might still get a hall pass.

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/04/msg00027.html
[1] https://david.kalnischkies.de/blog/2018/apt-for-dpl-candidates/
[2] https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2019/debian/debian-vote-statistics/

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