Hi *, So looking through the nominations, platforms and the current -vote threads, I'm left wondering if any of this actually matters. Only two candidates running, no IRC debate or rebuttals added to the platforms, and only a couple of topics people have even raised for the candidates to address? Debian used to involve lots of people with different ideas about how to improve free software; not just a handful of different ideas about how to run a free software project.
One of the most impressive things about Debian in the past was its exponential growth -- users, developers, packages, architectures, email volume, etc -- but I wonder if that's still happening, or if growth is something that's been outsourced to Ubuntu somewhere along the line. Maintaining an exponential growth curve essentially means finding new ways to make Debian twice as interesting at a constant rate -- each year or two, I'd guess. So here's the question, and really the only part of this mail that warrants a response: Over the next twelve months, what single development/activity/project is going to improve Debian's value the most? By how much? How will you be involved? A possible example might be "making Debian 5% faster on m68k -- that'll affect about 1% of our users, making them about 20% happier since speed is their number one issue, for an overall improvement of 0.2%". Another might be "we'll make web applications, like WordPress, Drupal, Tomcat etc, easy to install, activate and maintain; this will expand our userbase by 30%, and make 20% of our users three times happier -- that's an overall improvement of 82%". Another might be "we'll get 45% more patches from downstream distros (Ubuntu, Xandros, HP's Mi, etc) into Debian, and get 35% more patches from Debian incorporated back upstream, for a 96% improvement in our free software community participation". Another might be "we'll make working on Debian twice as fun so current developers spend twice as much time/effort on Debian, and we'll make participating sufficiently easier to get half as many contributors again without any drop in quality, for an overall increase in our rate of improvement of 150%". Another might be "we'll stop working on Debian and move developers and users to Ubuntu instead, following Canonical's existing goals/processes, giving users three times as many other folks they can turn to for support, pre-installed systems on various netbooks and laptops, and sharing work on things like archive maintenance, bug triage, and routine packaging making that take 70% as much work, with minimal transition costs of about 5% due to Ubuntu's derived nature, for an overall benefit of 389%". Communication is important, but not if it means everyone's time and attention gets focussed on things that don't make an appreciable difference to our goals, while things that would make a huge difference keep getting ignored or deferred. And even if we didn't want to commit to actual numeric values for different ideas, we've got plenty of developers and users we could poll to at least get an overall ordering. Bonus question: in retrospect, what single activity/etc over the past twelve months improved Debian the most? By how much? (Can you really justify that?) How were you involved? Cheers, aj
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