Re: Senseless Bickering and Overpoliticization
On Tue, Aug 31, 1999 at 09:33:45AM -0700, David Bristel wrote:
> Now, while my input means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of
> things, I SUGGEST that we reorganize things a bit. Perhaps with
> one person to organize each part of the distribution. Base having
> one, Optional having one, Important having one. While this may seem
> like it will fractionalize the distribution, what it does is gives a
> smaller group of maintainers who might be able to work together. The
> project leader would then work with these "leads". People would still
> be able to work together, but it would cut down on the bickering,
> since the leads could then work to decide policy.
this happens naturally anyway. there's absolutely no need to formalise
it. people working on particular parts of the distribution naturally
form working committees/teams/groups to make decisions and get things
done. e.g. the boot disks team, the X strike force, people interested in
debian-admintool, myself and a bunch of others who wrote the autoup.sh
script for the libc5 to libc6 transition, the dpkg v2 project(s),
deity/apt, the team who planned and implemented the perl 5.004 to 5.005
upgrade, etc etc.
all of these teams self-created spontaneously in response to a
particular need. we saw a problem, and we did what we could to fix it.
those who wanted to or were able to help were welcome to join in, and
those who had other things to work on worked on their own stuff. our
fixes worked well enough (or had no "competition" because nobody else
could be bothered doing the hard work to come up with an alternative) to
be adopted by most of the rest of the developers.
the only thing that will happen if particular individuals get appointed
to certain "positions" is that you will destroy the flexibility and
spontaneity of the collective - destroy our ability to self-organise
in response to any problem or need. too much formal structure will
inevitably lead to stagnation.
coming up with the debian Constitution may have been a *necessary* evil,
but we should never forget that it is an evil - it is there to serve us,
we are not here to serve it.
debian's a *functioning* anarchy (or near anarchy). it's not broke, so
don't fix it.
craig
--
craig sanders
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