gregor herrmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thu, 10 May 2007 13:42:37 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> There isn't any silver bullet solution. If there was, we probably >> would have taken it already. Some projects do better with it than >> others. Linux does a relatively good job here. > I'm not following the Linux community closely; do you think there are > points Debian could adopt or learn from? With Linux, I think it helps a lot that many of the people involved in kernel development are paid to do it and mentor others as part of their job. I do similar things for Debian, training other people in my group on how to build Debian packages and participate in the infrastructure, and hopefully over time that will bear fruit for Debian as well. Linux also has a good history of organized projects to help people get started, such as kernel janitors, and puts a lot of effort into collaboration infrastructure. And one of the best things about the Linux model is that Linus regularly talks about how he wants things done and what leads him to take stuff or not take stuff in public on the lists, which leads others to do the same. And those are interactive discussions, not just writeups. I think people learn a lot from those discussions. On Debian, the impression that I've gotten is that a lot of the real mentoring and discussion actually happens on IRC rather than on the lists. I don't know how effective that is. I'm personally really not an IRC person, and I'm already on enough different chat fora that I have no time to even look at another. > Hm, maybe that sounds naïve, but what about thinking about a way to > adopt strategies of mentoring, development, fine graining roles (job > descriptions, mutual agreements, appraisal&evaluation, ...) , etc. to > F/LOSS in general and Debian in particular? The main obstacle that I see is that that stuff takes a lot of time. I spend probably 5% of my work time on the coordination, record-keeping, and reporting parts of that sort of activity, which in a full-time job is quite reasonable. But it's not really a percentage; it's a quantity of time that those activities take. And I couldn't take a similar two hour per week cut out of my Debian volunteer work without a much greater impact on how much stuff I could get done. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
