On 01/22/2015 03:35 AM, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > However, the original poster made a very > interesting, long mail, with some questions to which the answers might > be interesting for the general public to read. I will take the freedom > to quote the questions along with my answers. Mr. Original Poster, if > you care to identify yourself and forward your full message, I'll be > happy. It actually was not that long. Your reply was much longer and much more enlighting. Thanks for that! Here is the content of my original email. I'll reply to your reply in another mail to not mix those.
Friendly, Torsten
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Not retiring, but worried about the current trend - are we
doing something wrong?
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 23:40:49 +0100
From: Torsten Landschoff <tors...@landschoff.net>
To: debian-priv...@lists.debian.org
Hello everybody,
[ObPrivate: I am not sure if the amount of retirements currently going
on is public knowledge. We should not hide our problems, but I do not
want to be the one who makes this public. Also these announcements
happen here so this might be the right forum.]
whenever I get the time to read debian-private I find more of those
emails with the word "retiring" in the subject line.
Most of those emails mention the lack of time to be a "real" developer
as the reason to quit. I have to wonder if doing stuff for Debian or at
least carrying the developer/maintainer status means that you are
supposed to have copious amounts of time available for your Debian duties.
Because currently I am pretty much out of spare time that I can put into
Debian work I feel pressed to retire as well. But I think that Debian
would be better off with many helping hands just helping with a little
bit instead of loading a few maintainers with dozens of packages.
Looking back I have the impression that Debian has the tendency to suck
you in. It is quite addicting to work on stuff that many people are
using and what's more to learn so much new stuff in the process. When I
got into Debian in 1998 I spent more time on it than on my studies of
computer science which took quite a hit. Reading debian-devel almost in
full took hours away from me each and every day but I could not stop,
mostly consuming information with little output. Whenever I had
something to add to a thread I noticed that somebody else shared my
point of view and made the point I wanted to make.
Also taking over packages like ghostscript and openldap back then really
overwhelmed me because I underestimated the effort required, especially
doing stuff like fixing the OpenSSL license dilemma (I actually tried to
port OpenLDAP to GnuTLS back then, which was way over my head at the
time). I have to say that I had the most fun just doing some QA work
like triaging bugs, sending patches etc. because I was not in charge.
This mail already gets too long so I cut it short here.
The questions I want to open up with this email are:
* do you have the impression that Debian wants only contributors that
consistently spend many hours for Debian each month?
* is there something that can be changed to make it less time
consuming to be a good citizen (like better ways to keep up with
relevant discussions)?
* does the concept of "the package maintainer" assign too much
responsibility, putting too many eggs in a single basket? (Freezing
a package if $maintainer goes MIA, stopping other contributors from
moving Debian forward)?
Greetings, Torsten
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