Debian getting better! (was Re: Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization)
I agree that the recent policy fracas has been demoralizing to many,
and that I think is the real downer right now. All I can say there,
is I hope it's just a bad memory soon, and I hope we think more than
twice before kicking something up to the technical committee.
But lets look at the plus side -- Debian is growing as fast as ever.
We have two commercial dists at least based on Debian, and several
free ones working off our base. (Of course, I can only hope that they
follow VA's lead and kick some effort back into Debian). We've got a
kickass autobuilder system (wanna-build) and the ports are going more
smoothly then ever, IMHO.
And if you don't think Debian is *technically* better than it was, I
encourage you to install a hamm box and work off that for a while. I
can't live without apt, without Adam Heath's netscape binary packages,
etc etc. Anthony Towns brought out some other good points.
All of our problems spring just from growth -- and growth is a good
thing. We just need to be ready for it.
Why do releases take so long? That's simply a fact based on the way
we maintain our archive. IMHO, until we radically revamp distribution
maintenance (and some folks are working on this), it will be at least
12 months between releases. Thank god unstable is really so stable,
and it's so easy to mix-and-match stable with unstable.
John talked about dselect -- I was shocked and please recently where a
newbie started praising dselect -- hell, its not bad for what it is.
Sure it doens't scale all that well to 4000 (or however many) packages
we have now. We just don't have a good, reasonable way to manage all
these damn packages. That's going to take a lot of work. More
approachable GUIs will also help.
Regarding the SPI -- I don't really care all that much about it.
They've always been slow. At least they can collect tax-deducitable
donations.
Just one more personal note -- there are some old hands who are
seriously thinking about leaving. Please reconsider -- you are
invaluable to the group, and we need you. It's helped me in trying
times to step out of the fray (maybe unsubscribe from -devel and
-policy for a while) and take it easy a bit; put my focus only on
stuff I like.
Anyhow, I really hope that we can resolve the persnickety stuff and
focus on the big issues, which in my mind, is the configuration
proposals and a new way to manage, organize, and release the
distribution.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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