Hi Stephan, > When I started to work for MOTU, some of you remember the times in > April/May 2005, we were a small group of people who tried to accomplish > the impossible. Working on an ammount of packages, where our mother > distribution Debian needs more then >1000 developers or maintainers for. > We were just 15-20 people, > > I have to admit, that working in a team without the usual rules is not > possible, but too many rules is no good for a team like us.
Is what MOTUs aim at doing even possible ? I think so. However,
currently, MOTU doesn't work that well. One can just read the list of
merges that should have been processed before UVF, but weren't, to realize
that. I think MOTU need more well-defined processes (!= rules) to work more
efficiently. This doesn't mean more bureaucracy at all. It would probably
mean less bureaucracy, since it would avoid writing stuff at two different
places, or pinging different MOTUs for the same stuff until one answers.
If we don't put such processes into place, I really think that ultimately,
we will fail. And that would suck a lot, because I don't like working on
projects which fail.
> To be honest, I was surprised, when some wiki pages about collaboration
> came up, and very political discussions were coming up.
While those discussions were not technical, I don't consider them
political. Anyway.
I see several reasons to work with Debian :
- Ethics : I personally want to improve the Free Software in general, not
just Ubuntu.
- Politeness : We borrowed a lot from Debian, trying to give back is just
normal behaviour.
- Technical : Having Debian in sync with us makes our life easier.
The ideal way to contribute with Debian would be that every MOTU & MOTU
Hopeful takes care of his share of the work. But it is clear that this
doesn't work, since some MOTU might consider talking to Debian high
priority, while some others consider this low priority, and we are all free
to deal with our free time like we want. (Not to mention that the current
/encouraging/ threads on the Debian lists).
I see two solutions :
Solution 1: Stop working with Debian. It means :
* switching from Upstream --> Debian --> Ubuntu
to Upstream --> Debian
`---> Ubuntu
for all packages.
* stop saying that we give back to Debian (There aren't many drawbacks
with that, it's basically just PR)
* recruiting more MOTUs (I don't see why Debian would need 1000 developers
while MOTUs could do the same work with 30 MOTUs. Of course, we rock more
than them, but not that much ;) )
Solution 2: Really make giving back a win-win situation, without increasing
the load on MOTUs.
I've thought about this, and will send later a proposal that (I hope) will
satisfy everybody after the necessary adjustments/discussion. Just wait ;)
> And we should stop this nonsense about politics and flames and ranting
> about others, who have nothing to do directly with Universe or Ubuntu.
I feel like the target in this sentence. I'd like to point out that the
ContributingToDebian wiki page and my mail about newer packages in Ubuntu
are "please could you considering doing it" texts, not "do it" texts. And
I didn't really see any rant about anybody (except on the Debian mailing
lists ;) ).
Thank you for reading that long mail,
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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