Marc Haber <[email protected]> writes: > I think that Debian should not force people maintaining packages to do > anything. There are people who are emotionally challenged to which > extensive communication with others is a burden.
> I do maintain most of my packages alone and I find that okay. For sudo, > there is a team with me doing like 95 % of the work which I am also okay > with. It feels very good to have people to talk to if I have questions > (and I have lots). > Adduser, on the other side, I would love to have team maintained. Are you > planning to fine me because I have failed to assemble a team around > adduser? Or what do you have in your mind to make people do team work if a > team fails to form? I want to echo and elaborate on this, and also say that we should be thinking about this from the perspective of how to manage a volunteer project. Debian is not a job. In general, people are not required to work on Debian (there are some exceptions around paid support and specific support contracts, but I'm speaking broadly, so putting that aside for now). Most of our labor comes from people volunteering their time and energy. That means we always need to ask why people volunteer to work on Debian? What are they getting out of it? How can we increase their rewards, by which I mean all the intangible benefits that lead people to volunteer to do things? Obviously, the most critical component is that people who work on Debian are proud of Debian and think it's important for Debian to exist and are volunteering to make that happen. Also, for a lot of people who have worked on Debian for a long time, Debian is a community and we work on Debian because we are working with our friends. We get those properties by being a public benefit volunteer organization that is doing work people care about, and of course we should maintain that. No one would disagree there. But there are a lot of such organizations in the world, and this is not the only factor that goes into how much time and energy people are willing to put into Debian. There are a bunch of other factors that vary a lot by person, and one of the reasons why Debian has been successful is that we provide a lot of flexibility so that different people can get different things out of the project, things that are important to them. Here's an incomplete list of reasons why I know some people work on Debian that I think is relevant to this point: 1. Unlike work for pay, Debian work can be done to the quality standards, level of care, and architectural design that maximizes one's sense of satisfaction of difficult work done well and thoughtfully. There is little monetary pressure; there is some coordination and timing pressure, but it's a lot less than in most jobs. Debian is a place where people can do their best work as they define their best work, be picky about things that employers don't want them to be picky about, and take the time to explore problems properly if that is what gives them satisfaction. 2. Debian work can be solitary if desired. After a day of constant meetings and coordination and having to compromise and adapt and squash one's own opinions in order to work with a bunch of other people, sometimes someone just wants to do their own thing their own way and drastically reduce the amount of effort they put into coordinating with other people. Debian currently is a place that is very well-suited for that because we have a structure that allows a very large and complex amount of work to be divided up into isolated chunks that can be solved independently. This means Debian gets a lot of those contributions. 3. In a paid job, often one has to work with some person one doesn't like. This is part of the social contract of paid employment: You keep personal conflicts out of the workplace and you suck it up and maintain professional cordiality. One of the benefits of distributed volunteer work is that you often don't have to do this. The places where it's necessary are much narrower, and as a volunteer, one has a much more robust option to say "no, I'm not working with that person; if that's a requirement for this volunteer work, then I will stop volunteering." I am neither pro team maintenance nor anti team maintenance. I am in favor of doing the things that make it more rewarding to volunteer to work on Debian. For some people, particularly new contributors, that means having easy onboarding, a robust team of people who can teach you how to do things and answer your questions, and a place to contribute where you can feel useful quickly. We should therefore have lots of those opportunities. For some people, the reward in Debian comes from going off to quietly work in one's corner or think hard about a problem and solve it the way that you want to solve it while minimizing the coordination that one has to do with other people. So we should also provide appropriate opportunities to do that. In other words, if we want more volunteers, we should try to maximize volunteer payment. We pay our volunteers not in money, but with mission and purpose, community, and collaboration, but also autonomy, control, and independence. Different types of compensation matter more to different people. Sometimes we have to force a particular way of doing things in Debian because we have a serious problem and we don't have another way of solving it. In those cases, we have to suck it up and live with the consequences, which may include losing volunteers. But we should do that carefully and selectively. I'm not sure pushing universal team maintenance on people who don't want it qualifies as careful or selective. If we cut volunteer contribution by undermining the rewards that they get from working on Debian, we will have fewer volunteers. That's just how it works. Sometimes there are hard trade-offs where in order to increase the rewards for some volunteers we have to limit the rewards for other volunteers. But, often, the trade-off is illusory and both ways of working can coexist in different areas so we can increase the intangible compensation for all of our volunteers. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
