I personally think that:
1. Mandrake will survive their little crisis handily; and
2. Mandrake the distro and MandrakeSoft would both benefit if they
took a leaf out of Debian's book.
Mandrake has the most intense and generally loyal user community of any
commercial Linux distro. Debian has the most intense and loyal of any, full
stop.
Instead of frustrating that community by trying to work with too few people
because of too little money, how about sharing out a little responsibility?
Debian shares it *all* out, and maybe that's going too far for a commercial
distro. However...
There must be a gazillion little packages (9.0 had 4007 RPMs in the CDs and
contrib) that a number of the people on this list, in groups of 3 or 4 for
redundancy, could take on as packagers.
General question: if you were joint-packager for a handful-to-a-score of
packages, responsible for doing the following, could you cope?
1. Have an up-to-date local Cooker mirror and installation (mirror for
when the installation breaks badly, as in libc or something); and
2. A "potted" distro for each of the still-supported releases, against
which to apply and test security fixes (not necessarily on your own
machine); and
3. Be on the announce (and security if appropriate list) for the
packages; and
4. Be on your own private-ish little lists with the other co-packagers
to which bug reports can be triaged and on which responses can be
discussed.
Different general question: would you instead (or also) be prepared to be
keepalive daemon for a few or few score such lists?
You wouldn't have to know much about the packages involved, just make sure
that unresponsive packagers were being replaced and that inbound bug reports
were really being dealt with.
If you can answer either of those affirmatively, perhaps we can take a lot of
little jobs on ourselves, thereby achieving this:
* Freeing up Staff Drakes to concentrate on the big-name stuff; and
* Dealing with a lot of the non-technical supervisory-type work for
critical-path Staff Drakes which would otherwise soak up their time,
bore them and involve them in conflict; and
* Getting things done to/with a package (other co-packagers acting as a
flywheel against wild and winsome ideas) which Staff Drakes otherwise
wouldn't have time for; and
* Making the Mandrake distro a more distributed, responsive, robust,
harder-to-target opponent in the marketplace.
And hey, it's kind of happening anyway, in some degree. Isn't it, Texstar,
Ranger, Borg, Pengiun Liberation Front, Thac and others? Why not have a plan
for managing all that positive energy?
Cheers; Leon
