gregor herrmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [cc and reply-to/m-f-t [EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Thu, 10 May 2007 12:32:26 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> There are other things >> that *are* signs of fundamental deficiencies in the project, > Would you mind to elaborate on this point, I'm really interested in > your opinion. The biggest problem with most open source / free software projects that I've been involved in is the bottleneck around evaluating and accepting infrastructural improvements. It's a very hard problem and I'm not saying that Debian is necessarily much worse off than many other projects, but we also have this problem in spades. The problem basically reduces to this: The core infrastructure is very important and therefore requires close monitoring and rigorous evaluation of what goes into it. It also can be subtle and complex and evaluating changes can be hard. There is always a core of people who understand the core infrastructure and feel confident in their ability to make changes, but due to the nature of dissemination of knowledge in a project, those people are also the best-positioned to make many other changes in a project and therefore are inevitably overloaded. And any changes single-track through the same people. As a result, there's usually little or no training of the next generation of people who can make infrastructure changes, less documentation than would be desirable of how things work, and few resources to evaluate changes and explain what would make them work. People who want to contribute to that central infrastructure get discouraged and frustrated and go away because no one has resources to show them what they might be doing wrong or, even if everything is great, even resources to simply commit and deploy their work. The people who do have the knowledge feel pulled in too many directions and tend to burn out. From the outside, the result looks like stagnation and arbitrary control of the center. From the inside, the result looks like stress, overwhelming workloads, impatient and frustrated people, and an impression that other people lack the care and caution required around the central infrastructure. I think this problem, in various different forms, is behind most of the major issues that are brought up in every DPL cycle and from time to time on -vote and -project. There isn't any silver bullet solution. If there was, we probably would have taken it already. Some projects do better with it than others. Linux does a relatively good job here. I'm heavily involved in some other projects that are doing much worse than Debian (INN, for instance, in large part because I'm currently putting more of my time into Debian). Oh, and by "infrastructure," I mean generically whatever is at the core of the project. For Debian, this is things like the buildd network, ftp-master, Debian admin, central infrastructure packages, etc. For software projects, it's more often the core, trickiest code or the infrastructure on which everything else is built. For Usenet hierarchy administration, it's core policies around what newsgroups get created. It varies a lot. I think Debian does very well here in some areas and not as well in others, but Debian suffers from those structural flaws around finding a way to train the next group, relieve load and stress on core contributors, and still ensure that changes to the infrastructure are audited with the detail and care that is indicated. There have been improvements by fits and starts in the past few months, and I don't think any of this is news to anyone. In a workplace environment, this sort of thing is often addressed by putting mentoring and staff development on the performance goals of senior staff and freeing up time that they're supposed to dedicate to training and documentation. Debian doesn't have that luxury, and I don't know what, if anything, we can effectively do at a project organization level to accomplish a similar goal. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
