Chris Waters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Debian stands for quality, not speed.
Unfortunately, of late the Debian gnome packages have been neither good nor timely. For instance---and not to pick on anyone in any way, I don't even know who this involves, this is just what happened to occur to me as an illustration---more than a month ago, the maintainer of gdm uploaded a new version that simply didn't work, and then promptly disappeared. Bug reports went unanswered, etc. I had to go back to xdm. Many of the core packages hadn't been touched in *months*, even though everyone else in the universe was benefitting from the bug fixes, stability improvements and updated features that were present in newer versions...and there were lots. Up until I started updating gnome-libs last week and working with the other packages people had covertly updated, I'd basically written off GNOME because it was unstable as all get out. So don't suggest the prior situation represented "quality", 'cause it didn't. > No, "we" wouldn't! I'm sorry, but one of the big advantages I find in > working with free software is that "we" take the time to do it right, > rather than working in a mad panic to meet arbitary deadlines. I get > enough of this "we need to release the moment that <foo> happens" crap > at work! Finally, I'm *not* proposing some dumbass rush to do a shit job just to say we did it. However, I am hoping that maintainers of these packages will give them careful but *prompt* attention, since Debian's spent the last several months letting this *highly user-visible* stuff languish. I think achieving parity in a timely fashion for this significant milestone in GNOME development would be a nice gesture towards some of those pesky users we have to satisfy. If course, if you don't care about the users---if you feel that this whole discussion is all about meeting some arbitrary deadline at the expense of quality, do whatever you want on whatever schedule you want. It is your right to spend your time how you wish. However, in that instance, you can expect me to do some NMUs of your packages because, *I* have decided, for this particular segment of the distribution, that I feel some responsibility to our users to make this happen in a timely fashion. Mike.
