On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 11:17:43PM +0100, Thomas Hood wrote: > If the problem is lack of motivation, > and the chief motivator is a sense of responsibility, then you don't want > to diffuse that.
Specifically motivation to do *this* task, rather than any of the others in the pile that need doing. People who maintain significant packages tend to be busy. Their reason for doing one thing over another will be primarily dependent on what they want to do, and what they feel they *should* do. > > We would all be much worse off with the abolition of individual > > responsibility. > > The constitution already abolished it -- at least, if you interpret > article 2.1 the way some people have. I consider 'individual responsibility' to be a matter of personal ethics, not enforced punishment. We do have a few morally bankrupt maintainers (or, non-maintainers). I think the majority of developers have some sense of responsibility, though. This belief is primarily founded on the fact that I don't think Debian could have survived this long at this size without it. > Maybe it would be useful to reinforce a sense of responsibility in Debian. You can't reinforce or enforce ethics - attempting to do so merely gives you obedience, or a herd mentality. And I don't think that a blame culture will accomplish anything. On the other hand, I think there might be some benefit to requiring that the Maintainer field must always denote one single Debian developer, who would be the "buck stops here" guy for that package. Not an applicant, not a mailing list, and not a group of people. I believe the tools have now advanced to the point where this is a practical option. In general you're always far better off forcing every *change* to a given component to go through a single individual. Large projects need a pumpking, because dogpiling creates lousy software. For Debian this would be cumbersome and unwieldy as a rule, but some high-importance tasks could benefit from it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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