Hi,
On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 08:10:54PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> But they're not as good at the things that large pools of
> volunteers are good at, like maintaining lots of packages that are of
> interest to small groups of people.
I'm following the example of others by cherry picking from Russ' e-mail
I would subscribe in general but I would like to add something to this
statement. Since more then ten years (Debian Med became 10 years in the
beginning of 2012) I do not hesitate to explain why Debian as a
community driven project was choosen for supporting medical software (at
this time versus commercial distributors like RedHat or SuSE - Ubuntu
did not even existed at this time). When starting the Debian Pure
Blends effort (under a different name) in 2003 I was hoping that other
fields might follow this path quickly because if it would be possible to
dive into a workfield which is really quite hard to cover (there was not
that much of free medical software at this time) others like for
instance games, multimedia, GIS and several other fields should have way
better chances to accomplish the mission to assemble a strong team and
make Debian the distribution of choice for the workfield XY. I have to
admit that the effect of having some successful examples (see my last
announcement[1]) is lagging a bit behind my expectations but anyway we
can present also some numbers (as requested by Christian) for the
growth.
I made some questionnaire[2] which revealed that in the Debian Med team
were 4 DDs who had this status even in 2002 but in the last 10 years we
got additional 9 DDs and 1 DM (who is currently working hard to also
become a DD). In other words: a very small subproject of Debian which
is from a popcon point of view close to irrelevant to the general
distribution, having a quite narrow focus on a small user base is able
to attract one developer per year (that's about 1% of active Debian
developers). Moreover those new DDs do not only stick to this small
field but rather dive into other fields (Charles Plessy was just
nominated as policy editor.)
So my answer to Christian would be: Lets try to fill more niches inside
the Free Software world and grow on narrow pathes into different
directions - this way we will find many enthusiastic newcomers who
currently would not even imagine to become a DD.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/10/msg00008.html
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Developers
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