On 9/15/2022 11:59 AM, Gerardo Ballabio wrote: > Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > > I have read much of the documentation online about how Debian understands > itself, but I have never heard the term "do-ocracy" before. > > As I understand, it is an informal term, as such I don't expect to > find it in formal documents. I read it as meaning "those who do the > work run the show". I believe that is a sensible rule for a community > of volunteers. > > > Obviously, my proposal would need to somehow define who are the users > that should be given a formal vote for GRs, the DPL, etc. > > I do believe that being open to listening to other people's advice is > a virtue, and that the Debian project should definitely listen to its > users, but I don't think that this should necessarily translate into > voting rights. > > Besides, voting isn't always the best way to make decisions. On > technical matters it is usually better to let it to those who know the > subject best, and those are normally the people who routinely work on > it -- which brings us back to the "do-ocracy" concept. > > Also, please consider that while voting rights are restricted to > Debian members, discussions are usually open to everybody, so if you'd > like to contribute to Debian's decision-making process, you already > can. > > > I actually, after some fruitful > discussion with some of the people on debian-user, tentatively came to the > conclusion that the fact that Debian is created by volunteers is probably one > of the biggest *disadvantages* of Debian software. > > If you could explain concisely how you came to that conclusion, I'd > like to read it. My view is quite the opposite but I suppose that > learning a different way of thinking about this issue may help me > widen my perspective.
To put it in the most brief terms, I come to that conclusion based on what many people are telling me: Debian maintainers cannot fix bugs in software because they are just volunteers. That explains why I almost always am at least annoyed by one or two bugs when running Debian software, and sometimes after an update the computer is totally unusable until I can debug it and find the fix, because volunteers don't have the time to do it for me. That is what most everyone on debian-user is telling me. Do you disagree with what they say? Also, in my experience, these bugs and catastrophic failures caused by updates of a supposedly stable release happened *much* less often when I used software that is written by paid developers. Best regards, Chuck