Re: Community renewal and project obsolescence
Hi Raphael,
thanks a lot for your analysis and sorry for my late reply.
Am Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 08:01:16PM +0100 schrieb Rafael Laboissière:
> > https://salsa.debian.org/rafael/debian-contrib-years
>
> First of all, I wish you all a happy 2024.
+1
> I have updated my repository at salsa.d.o (URL above), integrating some
> elements discussed in the present thread, in particular the analysis
> proposed by Mo Zhou and the comments made by Steffen Möller.
I'd like to share some ideas. Steffen blamed the advent of homebrew and
conda as one factor which I think is true to some extend in some fields.
But I also think that we are a victim of our own success to be the
distribution growing the most derivatives. Ubuntu and Mint might be the
most famous ones and if I'm not misleaded the number of Ubuntu users is
at least one order of magnitude higher than from (pure) Debian (if you
don't count Ubuntu users as Debian users which they actually are
indirectly). I do not want to discuss whether this is good or bad for
Debian (which would be a long list of pros and cons) but contributors
are recruited from users and we simply do not see the number of
derivatives contributors in our stats. Maybe we simply see patches
arriving from some derivative which are simply collected by a single
contributor (hopefully they really report back issues - my experience
with bug reports+patches from Ubuntu are pretty good ... but I see only
those isses that are reported since I do not check the bug trackers
there whether there are other known problems hidden from our sight).
You might know that I'm very focussed on Blends. The idea way born when
I noticed lots of dervatives dealing with the same topic as I (Debian
Med with a focus on biology and medicine). While lots of people
understood Blends wrongly as a way to create a derivative its the
contrary: Don't derive from Debian but rather create a Blend to find a
solution *inside* Debian.
Over more than 20 years of Blends effort I learned that it is pretty
hard to make this concept popular. In Debian Med we finally managed to
attract some of the derivers in this field to integrate their stuff into
Debian and by doing so they also became Debian contributors. But
meanwhile those contributors drifted away for different reasons (changed
jobs etc.) So at least their work was kept in Debian instead of beeing
lost in an orphaned derivative.
After all these years I need to confess, that my original plan about
Blends somehow failed. I assumed that every Debian Developer /
Contributor is inside the non-Debian world in some community. If this
Contributor would work hard to make Debian fit for this community new
contributors would arrise from this community inside Debian to make
Debian fit even better for the own usage. Since years I include the
proof that this *can* work in my slides of Debian Med related talks[1].
So some outsiders project - biologists and people working in medicine
are by far a lower percentage of overall Debian users than the >1% of
Debian Developers we have in this field - can attract constantly
contributors with a growing tendency in contrary to your graph! This is
a good sign that my original assumption, a Blend can attract
contributors, might be correct. To come back to the "reasons for
decreasing number of contributors": We have to less Blends done right.
My gut feeling is that this is somehow connected to the fact that
developers usually are overworked even with technical work and do less
to reach out to some community which is considered "additional work
squashing some time limit dedicated to Debian". I confirm that lots of
my outreachy acticitiy (GSoC, Outreachy, MoM, in person meetings
(sprints), other ways to contact the community) did not really led to
long term contributors. However, if I would not have started to reach
out the Debian Med project would never ever have reached its current
status of nearly 1000 packages in main[2] with a relatively low number
of RC bugs and by probably maintaining definitely more than 500 packages
in other teams (Debian Science, Debian Python Team, R Pkg tem, etc.)
I also did some investigation in team metrics[3] to see how teams
(originally targetting at Blends teams) are performing. I admit I'm
really proud about beeing "beaten" last year in the number of bugs
squashed[4]. The interesting thing in this bug squashing graph is not
only the fact that it is in contrast to your graph since the number of
contributors is increasing over years. Its also the not visible fact
that the top 3 bug squashers are not actually experts in our field.
Étienne and Nilesh just joined since its fun to work in this team.
To summarise this long mail: Another item in your list of reasons is,
that we should care better for our contributors in strong teams (either
topic related Blends or kind and inviting language teams).
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20230910_debconf_med-team_talk/teams_handout.pdf
-> slide 6/31 "Debian Med has attracted one developer per year"
Data are based on this survey
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Developers
[2] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-med-packaging@lists.alioth.debian.org
[3] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/
[4] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/bugs_debian-med.png
--
http://fam-tille.de
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