Alexis Sukrieh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Anthony Towns a écrit :
>> Personally, I'd say that now would be the time for any anti-payment >> people to say "we can do this better, and look, we'll prove it", and >> make up their own target date for etch, and demonstrate how much energy >> and effort can be mustered just by having a good idea and good people >> and putting them together to get a goal achieved. Er, this makes little sense to me. Much of the hard work for the etch release has now been done. Comparing actions taken at this stage to actions taken at an earlier stage doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense. I don't think you'd be able to prove anything interesting either way with that. > 1. Paying Debian Developers seems to make (some of) them completely > humorless, everything is taken a hundred percent seriously, as if the > dollars in their pockets droped their fun hability. That's a pitty. Huh, I didn't notice that. Maybe I'm normally humorless anyway. :) > 2. You can pay DDs to boost up the wonderful project that is Debian, > but you definitely cannot blame other DDs for not being as much involved > as you'd like. Remember that a vast majority of us are people who > contribute in their free time, most of them doing the best they can > given their free time. Yup. I would hope that everyone realizes this. Also, one thing that should be totally clear, if it wasn't already, is that the very most that anyone would ever be able to do with monetary contributions to Debian is perhaps provide additional resources in very targetted areas, not even fund a complete core task. There's a ton of unfunded release work going on, just like always. > 3. You seem to forget that the Debian Social Contract cleary defines > two priorities for DDs: The users and the free software. I personnaly > don't read "Our priority is to release quickly". To me releasing when > "it's ready" is clearly better than setting up some > "pretty-useful-etch-ignore" tags and stuff like that so the release can > be out in time. Did we ever spoke about the overall quality of the > resulting boosted-release? etch feels to me (having been running it for quite a while now) as a bit more release-ready than sarge was at this point. (Note that I cannot comment on d-i at all; I only use the installer when I bootstrap a completely new piece of personal equipment. I don't even use it at work, since we use FAI for everything.) Once you reach a particular size in a free software project, you can't *purely* release when it's bug-free or you'll never release. I've seen that time and time again in free software projects. Some of them die because of that sort of perfectionism. Others devolve into an endless cycle of betas and CVS snapshots. There are quite a few of those packaged in Debian. As soon as your project reaches a size where you will never be able to fix all of the bugs (and it doesn't have to be very large for that), releasing is *always* a tradeoff between fixing more bugs and calling it good enough and kicking it out the door. *Both* actions help users -- fixing bugs helps, as does establishing a new stable baseline. It will *never* be completely ready. > 4. Given that, be aware that I don't blame neither Andi nor Steve for > trying the experiment, but I hope they can understand that beyond > themselves, the whole experiment changed the game. That matters, that > triggers reactions, and to me that is definitely understandable. Yes, I think it's important to factor into the judgement of how this experiment went the fact that it changes the game. It's not *only* a question of how much work the people paid managed to get done. So, we missed the release deadline. I'm not horribly surprised; paying two people to work on it is helpful but not enough to actually release, and I'm not sure that the schedule is that variable through adding more manpower. Paying two people to work on the release full-time probably sped up the release by a bit, though. Now, I'm curious whether the funders behind dunc-tank (who are the people who actually get to make this decision -- it's their private money, unaffiliated with the project, and they can spend it however they want) felt like what was achieved was worth the price. Personally, I would go back to my feeling at the start of this whole conversation and say that release management, while an important thing for the project as a whole, is not an obvious thing to spend money on because it's a repeating need. We need infrastructural improvements there, not a regular infusion of manpower, because the latter doesn't help with the scaling problem. I think dunc-tank would get more bang for its buck by funding specific targetted development in large areas that would make Debian better, such as dpkg 2.0, or a replacement init system with better dependency management and faster boot times, or some sort of comprehensive work on the shared library dependency problem that would make library transitions less painful. I think that sort of specific contribution from a third-party funding source would also be less controversial, leading to less time lost in debate. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
