Re: Discussing issues

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 02:55:39AM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 08:13:51AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: 
> > I am not sure i follow you exactly here, to be able to vote at debian
> > elections, you have to be a debian developper and becoming one is quite
> > a involved thing.
> 
> I used to be a Debian developer in fact. I think they eventually
> lapsed my account after a couple years of inactivity.

A, i didn't know that, and yes you are no more listed as a developper.

That said, the new maintainer process has evolved much in the past
years, and is now much more involved. It still is a lot of controversy
about this. We are around 800 active developpers right now, accordying
to our latest leader elections.

> There are numerous Debian developers, and there's a clear process to
> become one.

Well, there is a clear process, but what i wanted to say is that it is a
clearly involved one, and not really of the scale of the 'smaller
contribution' you spoke about.

> > Sure the personal contribution of a debian developper may only be to
> > package a few packages, i package 10 for example, but the average is
> > around 7-1 i think, and we don't kick out unactive developpers or such,
> > altough people got kicked out over abuse of debian facilities and such,
> > but the debian situation is different from the XFree86 one, since it is
> > comprissed of mostly a lot of small packages, not a huge single one.
> 
> Of course, many people are suggesting that XFree86 be modularized for
> precisely this reason.

Well, sure. That said, even if we modularize XFree86, it would not be as
independent as the debian packages, or even as the gnome ones. In debian
you could have a group of packages which are totally independent from
another group of packages, and i guess you will never get that in
XFree86. Also, remember that debian has (nowaday at least) a pretty
heavy administrative infrastructure, a lot of policy stuff and such, and
in the end of the day, it is still the people who work the most who get
the last word, especially the debian-admins, the ftp-masters, the
security team, etc. And these work exactly as the core team has worked
upto now, maybe in a even closer fashion. And they must live in an
alternate world with more than 24h a day from what i see from their
activity.

Friendly,

Sven Luther