Ben Finney <[email protected]> writes: > Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:
>> We're running somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 Debian stable >> servers. I'm afraid running popcon on them is a non-starter so far due >> to concerns about information exposure. When this was previously >> discussed on debian-devel, it became clear that we're far from the only >> ones in that situation. > Right. One possible explanation for such a low popcon result for Debian > is that those who are concerned about popcon exposure also want fine > control in many other areas, including support for many > marginally-popular packages, and so selectively prefer Debian. Those > hosts would therefore not show up on either list. > Other explanations are possible, of course. I suppose I shouldn't really be discussing this too much since it's a question for the DPL candidates rather than a general discussion topic, but I can't refrain from pointing out something else: my personal goal for Debian is not for it to be the most popular distribution. It's for it to be the best distribution, for a definition of best agreed upon by the people who work on it. In other words, in the grand open source tradition, we're creating something for the broad community, but in the process we're largely solving our personal problems and scratching our personal itches. I want Debian to continue to be an excellent server operating system that I can use for Stanford University's internal IT infrastructure. If it changed in a way that made it a bad server operating system but made it much more popular in the broad sense, that to me would be a bug, not a feature. Obviously insofar as we can, we all want Debian to be all things to all people, and I think we all owe each other an obligation to try to find good solutions for everything that people want to use Debian for, among those people who are working on it. But, even acknowledging good questions about how to attract new contributors, I don't think pure popularity should be a driving goal for the project, and certainly shouldn't override other goals such as sound technical judgement. AJ's question, and particularly his other longer response to the question about disappearing DPLs, really highlight what I think are some disagreements between he and I about how we see Debian. I fundamentally do not believe in the "grow or die" model or think that projects need to constantly move on to the next shiny thing. I don't believe in it for economies, I don't believe in it for businesses, and I don't believe in it for Debian. I don't think that's a goal to pursue (or, for that matter, to not pursue). I'd much rather focus on doing good work and encouraging and mentoring contributors and letting metrics like total user count do whatever they do. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
