Is Debian becoming too big?

[Cesar Eduardo Barros <cesarb@web4u.com.br>]

OK, rant mode on.

I think Debian is getting too big for the number of maintainers it has. It
seems the maintainers have too many packages, and don't care a bit about some
of them. Bugs get ignored for a long time, when they should be fixed ASAP.
Packages are made and released with almost no testing, instead of being tested
more by their maintainers and other people (the maintainer should let them rest
a little on a private "staging area" on his pages on master instead of
uploading and waiting for the resulting breakage).

Now we have (last time I checked) more than 3000 packages and less than 500
maintainers. But not all of these maintainers seem particulary active and
willing to fix bugs. I understand everyone has something else to do in his life
(like studying or working), but people should understand the responsability
they have as a Debian maintainer.

The overall number of bugs only seem to go down on bug-fixing parties... But we
only have about two or three of them per year.


I think we could get an external QA group to go through all the bugs and send
patches to the maintainers. But this will only work if they stop being lazy and
work on their packages.

-- 
Cesar Eduardo Barros
cesarb@web4u.com.br
cesarb@dcc.ufrj.br