Hi Holger, Am Thu, May 30, 2024 at 04:48:17PM +0200 schrieb Holger Wansing: > Andreas Tille <ti...@debian.org> wrote (Sun, 26 May 2024 11:31:24 +0200): > > - Do you feel good when doing your work in Debian Boot team? > > While I have to admit that I'm mostly doing just the simple things :-)
I consider this a weak excuse. While I'm known for lots of uploads and bug fixes I'm so happy that people do not go and check how many low hanging fruits of bugs with patches and semi-automated upgrades are amongst those. Doing the simple things (but doing them right) is very much part of the job and I'm happy we have people doing these. As I previously said in the "Blends in D-I" suggestion I'm extremely thankful for your work and its far from simple since that issue is nearly 20 years old and nobody else (including me) found some acceptable solution for it. Thanks again for this! > I consider myself being only a small candle on the cake. > Being not a programmer, I don't do difficult or critical changings most of > the time, so relaxed gaming here ;-) Good that you are considering your volunteer time relaxed. > > - Do you consider the workload of your team equally shared amongst its > > members and who actually is considered a team member? (I added some > > persons in CC who have recently answered to questions on the mailing > > list.) > > My impression is, that kibi might be kind of overloaded (at least some time), > since he's the mainly active part, when it comes to the "difficult or > critical things", which I leave around ... > (and his answer to this survey confirms this) > But I cannot see what I can do against this :-( (see below) > > (ok, that's not strictly correct generally, there are some people taking care > of specific packages, taking workload from kibi's shoulders, but that's not > for the majority of packages) I think I've spotted some instance of the reason which finally motivated me to do this team contacts: For a long time I have the impression that Debian is driven by several "one-person-teams" (to varying extend of the one person influence and tendency to burn out). I see my task as DPL in trying to find means to help on this front. I'm just making some note in my Bits from DPL draft that Debian Boot team might need some help - other ideas how to attract new contributors are welcome. > > - Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team? > > Since I lack the skills to lead new contributors into doing the difficult > or critical things from above (where we would mostly need more manpower, > if at all), I'm a bit lost here ... Attracting people to the things you are doing might help anyway. > > - Can you give some individual estimation how many hours per week you > > are working on your tasks in youre team? Does this fit the amount of > > time you can really afford for this task? > > This ranges from zero to 5-10 hours per week, depending on variables like > the state of development cycle of release (when the next release comes > nearer, I try to get missing translation updates, which leads to more > commits and uploads, as an example). > And: I'm fine with this time effort. Sounds good and healthy. > > - I recently had some discussion on Chemnitzer Linuxtage what might > > be the reason for derivatives to write their own installers. While > > I'm personally perfectly happy with the way I can install Debian I'm > > somehow wondering why others are spending time into a problem we > > are considering "solved" and whether we can learn something from this, > > That was often mentioned, and the arguments for the Debian Installer was the > broader range of architectures, and as well as the support for older hardware. > You can easily create a nicer installer, if you develop from scratch for only > a small variety of up-to-date devices. > > OTOH since Buster we have the Calamares installer on the live images as well, > to serve such approaches. > The idea behind the Calamares installer is exactly that: develop a framework, > which can be used to install a variety of distributions, to solve those > distributions from developing their own installer. Ahhh, I was not aware that Calamares is actually what I get when I select live installer. Thank you for the clarification. > So I think we are on a not that bad position here ... (?) I never said we are bad. I was simply wondering why derivatives do extra work. > > - I once had a amr64 based laptop (Pinebook) and had to learn that I > > can't use the Debian installer which was frustrating. I was told > > that this is the case for hardware that is not featuring some BIOS-like > > boot system. Do you see any chance to let the installer work for > > non-Intel architectures (or should I rather ask this question on > > Debian CD (sorry for my ignorance if I miss responsibility here.) > > - Can I do anything for you? > > I guess most teams are undermanned in the free software world, and there's > nothing one can do against easily, but I consider this being the main > "issue", > if any... As I said I see my task as DPL in spotting these issues and pointing them out to the public. I have no idea whether this leads to anything - but if I do not try we will never know. Thanks a lot to your (and the other team members) extensive answers. This is all very appreciated. Kind regards Andreas. -- https://fam-tille.de
