Hey *, I thought it might be interesting to have the perspective of an ex-DPL on some of the questions that have been raised. FWIW, etc. (For people who don't know me, I was DPL in 2006 and release manager from around 2000-2004, among other things)
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 08:30:03AM +0100, Gerfried Fuchs wrote: > I have a question to the candidates: History has shown that DPLs more > or less disappear not too long after their period or at least reduce > their visible efforts immensly. So one way of looking at this is not so much as "disappearing" as "graduating" -- you can't really stay as DPL for very long, and on a personal level, and after you've finished, you naturally want to move on to new and even more exciting things. A Daily WTF article from a couple of years ago talks about this sort of thing in relation to jobs, but I tend to think it applies here too: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx One way to "graduate" from a role like DPL and still be obviously involved in Debian is taking on an old-timer advisory role -- like the tech ctte or SPI or release wizard. There aren't that many of those roles, though. The other alternative is to start working on something else interesting more or less from scratch, and how much that involves Debian depends a bit on how involved new projects are with Debian in general. For me, I've been following -devel, -project and -vote via the web archives for the past year and a bit, and so far what's going on mostly just doesn't match the stuff I'm interested in. *shrug* It happens. There's also the question of how welcome ex-DPLs actually are. Sitting in a role like that in Debian attracts a lot of internal criticism, either because you're doing things or because you're not, and that criticism tends to linger around. And from the other side, once you're out of a role like DPL, someone else will have taken it up and be promoting their own views and projects, which is harder if you've got to find respectful ways to disagree with ex-luminaries who liked doing things the way they were done back in the good ol' days. On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 02:40:32AM +0000, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote: > Sometimes technical Debian discussions (mailing lists, bug reports, > blog posts, etc.) become personal flame-wars. > Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is > acceptable for the Debian project? > What would you do to reduce those? In some respects, I tend to think the focus on "heated discussions" is a bit misplaced. Heated discussions can be great; entertaining to watch, fun to be involved in, and ultimately advancing important issues. And if you're too afraid to have them, you end up avoiding addressing those important issues and going nowhere. Getting heated disagreements to a successful resolution -- and ideally something approaching a consensus is much more important. The downside is that "heated" often equates to people ending up feeling like their ideas aren't respected, or worse that they aren't even respected as a person. And there's no point talking or helping people when you don't get no respect. On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 01:12:57AM +0100, Joerg Jaspert wrote: > Do you plan on taking on a "2IC" or a team? > If so: Who? And why this/those? That was one of the things that having Steve as my 2IC was meant to help with -- by coming a very close second he'd already demonstrated that a bunch of developers would trust him more than me to handle problems that came up, and having him as 2IC gave them someone else to contact should that come up. That might not have worked if we'd felt we couldn't get along, or if he wasn't willing to stand up to me while serving "at my pleasure" so to speak, but fortunately those mostly weren't a problem either. The 2IC thing was meant to be about trying to actually get along with the people who disagree with you; not so much about finding people who agree with you and ganging up on the people who don't. I guess I'd contend that that's the only way of showing respect -- if you only get along with people as long as they completely agree with you, that's doesn't seem very respectful of them. On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 02:44:15PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Releasing is regularly the hardest thing that Debian does, not just > technically but also socially. [...] > > Do you have any ideas how, as DPL, you would (or even could) address this? I'd contend the most valuable thing the RM or release team can have is respect; if people respect the release team, then their predictions of freeze and release dates will be listened to, stabilisation and bug fixes get prioritised, and the dates become (more or less) self-fulfilling prophecies. On the other hand if they're ignored, bugs accumulate, people don't bother fixing them because they don't think the release is near, and shockingly the release doesn't get any closer. Maintaining that respect is very difficult: there are a constant bevy of problems that need to be tracked, prioritised and dealt with, a near constant chorus of complaints about not knowing enough about what's going on, and ultimately not a great deal of support available. OTOH, attacking the release team can get plenty of support: the release team is nominally the "elite" within the project, so criticism is (justifiably) one of the cherished democratic freedoms within the project. Unfortunately, it's cherished by everyone -- which can easily mean that it fairly quickly becomes everyone versus the release manager. It's much easier for the DPL to deal with a conflict by saying "Dear RM, can you provide an updated status report?" than it is to tell a random developer "Please stop asking the RM what's going on, it's interfering with the release." It's not an easy job for the release manager/release team to maintain respect even without that, of course; I'd contend the "we'll synchronise with Ubuntu" announcement didn't help for example. But it's a hard job. I'd say a lack of support, or equivalently, sufficient opposition, can make it impossible. > I'm personally the most concerned with the social issues. A delayed > release can be frustrating but doesn't have that much negative impact, A delayed release has a huge negative impact on whether people will trust your freeze/release predictions in future. The technical and social issues are pretty entangled in at least that sense. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <a...@erisian.com.au> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87b3a4191003220106y5baf5f20l6e31ec31215fc...@mail.gmail.com
