On Sun, Jan 01, 2012 at 01:40:36PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > Well put Russ!!!
Fully ACK. > Relative percentage is not that important as long as absolute number is > positive, which means that fun goes on and our efforts are of > benefit ;) > > And depending on the audience (field of endeavor, habbits etc) > statistics might vary [e.g. 1] ;-) > > [1] http://neuro.debian.net/blog/2011/2011-06-27_software_survey.html I can perfectly confirm this. From a Debian Med perspective I can say that while there are some comparable initiatives in Fedora and SuSE these do not really fly. Today I had a discussion with a Fedora GSoC student who sees his work in danger of becoming orphaned because nobody really cares about his packages of medical software and also SuSE medical seems to make more annoucements rather than packaging work. So my idea is (and sorry for repeating myself over and over) that we can perfectly dart into specific fields because we are involving experts in those fields. The Fedora Medical guy mentioned that there is a lack of management work. And I can confirm that this is perfectly what I'm observing in several Debian internal projects. To boil it down to some specific projects I have observed in the last time: Debian Games, Debian Multimedia, Debian GIS and Debian Enterprise - all these projects (while potentially targeting at a much larger user base than Debian Med) are lacking what I would call project management in the sense that people claim to be busy enough with packaging and do not have time for other things (like talking to people - upstream and users, telling them how to become involved and setting specific standards and goals). I'm pretty sure that if I would have kept on packaging only from the beginning Debian Med would have way less than 1/3 of its current number of packages, way less than 1/3 of ist current number of active team members and way less of users. Finally it is fun to work in a healthy team. So please keep in mind that enhancing Debian is not only adding packages to a pool but also how to form strong teams around a set of packages to make the packaging sustainable. I'm quite convinced that this strategy will lead to an increasing number of users and that it is even more important than the frequency of releases. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
