Questions for all candidates
Dear candidates!
Firstly, thanks for stepping up for running for DPL.
Unfortunately, outside of maintaining my own packages I've had little
Debian time for the last few months, so I'm not as up to date with all
the Debian problems as I'd like to be.
But, lucky for you, there's enough difficult questions to go around!
(sorry, you're all experienced DD's, so no low-ball questions here, take
it as an opportunity!). Some of it is very specific and some more
open-ended, answer as little or much as you like.
1. Community Team
How do you feel about the Community Team?
Is there something you would change?
Do you have any ideas in how to support them so that they can help our
community better?
2. VCS
Salsa has been stable for a number of years now, and git is clearly a
good choice of default VCS (even though not perfect or preferred for all).
How do you feel about VCS requirements in Debian? Should it be required
that Debian packages are maintained in Salsa? How do you feel about dgit
and tag2upload?
Do you have any ideas about VCS use in Debian that you would promote as DPL?
A while back someone told me that they want to NMU one of my packages.
It was maintained in /debian on salsa, so I reminded them that this is
basically collab-maint these days and they did the right thing and just
did a team upload instead. Julian mentioned common package maintenance
in how it's done in Ubuntu. What do you think about the /debian team and
would you want to promote the use of that as DPL?
3. DebConf
DebConf is great. I hate the process of getting a visa to travel (often
at least a whole day's worth of admin), and I don't like airports or
travel by plane (which is usually at least two days in each direction).
And yet, I sacrifice about 1% of my year just to get to DebConf, because
it's worth it.
Often though, I feel like DebConf can be better. My biggest wish is to
have more core Debian people there. Often, sessions are planned to
discuss really important and crucial things, but then we don't have the
key people present to really dig into it and bring it forward. At some
point I've wondered if we should invite-by-default certain members of
certain teams. Make it clear that there will be travel and accommodation
and food for them if they want to come. It might not be enough to
convince people with children or other commitments at home, but perhaps
it could help a little.
I digress, this isn't about my gripes with DebConf, it's about yours.
What do you think are the biggest problems with DebConf, and if you had
a magic wish or two as DPL to change things, what would that be?
4. Installation media
It's amazing how much Linux distributions offer in the variations of
installation media (like ISO images) they provide.
For example, Ubuntu differentiates between a Desktop and Server
installation image. OpenSUSE too and they also have LEAP (a rolling
release) and some distributions also offer immutable install options. In
Debian we offer the netinst iso as the default from our home page, with
a link that leads to larger installation images, live images and cloud
images.
Do you have any opinion on the selection of images that we provide? Is
it optimal? Can we do better? Are there features that you would consider
missing?
Not an essential question for a DPL candidate, but it's interesting to
know your thoughts on this and get more insight on how you think about
Debian.
5. Favourite colour
Ok, I lied, here's an easy question for you, what's your favourite colour?
I haven't even read all your platforms yet, so I'll probably post some
more pesky questions later on.
I hope you have fun during the campaign period!
-Jonathan
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