On 25/03/2017 13:04, martin f krafft wrote: > - What does universality mean to you and the project? >
To me, in short, it means that we are able to address a wide range of different needs in a single homogeneous system. Debian has been successful as a general and stable platform where others can build on top of it to produce a more specialized product. The universality of Debian on the technical side has some consequences on how its community works and how it is built. Those different implemented needs were brought by people with different perspectives. Despite their differences, they were able to collaborate and work together in order to build a rich and unique operating system. I believe this aspect helped us to build a strong and diverse community over the years. But sometimes, some specific areas of Debian need special care. And due to the nature of our project, we are often unable to mobilize needed resources to make necessary changes. Universality may also bring some complexity. This leads us to situations where we can be stuck and are unable to embrace the change because it breaks old solutions (still useful to many). We eventually take the good decisions, but it takes a long time. At the same time, many contribute to Debian because it is fun. So if we are not careful, we may lose long-time contributors only because some change wasn't well understood (or well-explained, depending on which side you stand). Finally... while Debian contributors did a great job by integrating thousands of projects in one archive, I still think more efforts should be spent on making Debian easier to install, documentation easier to find, etc... I believe those points can help us to reach a higher level of universality. -- Mehdi
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