On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 11:27:17PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: As is probably obvious, I have a tendency to answer questions that interest me, whether they were intended rhetorically or not.
> > First: "The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made > > common cause to create a free operating system." > [...] Imagine Debian as simply a collection of bits sitting on a box > somewhere. No Project machines. No mailing lists. No BTS. No > keyring. No master archive. No mirrors. How easy would it be to > pursue our purpose then? The alternative extreme would be to imagine we had a bunch of project machines, a bunch of mailing lists, a state of the art BTS, a keyring, tonnes of donated project machines, a mirror network, dozens of machines setup to do automatic building and testing of packages every day... but no actual software we can give users to install. I'd think the former hypothetical project would be far more useful to potential users, and have better achieved our goals than the latter. Certainly it's fairly easy to go from a good collection of bits to a viable and useful distribution: Knoppix has done so, for example. Equally certainly, getting the bits in the first place is non-trivial. > You tell me -- are issues other than technical ones important at all? I'd've thought it was obvious that I find issues other than those that directly affect users important; I have and do spend a bunch of time working on those sorts of issues, after all. But I think it's especially important for people who do do that to remember that the important job isn't working on the processes, it's working on packages. It's so important because, I believe, we have to ensure that all the time and energy we spend working on process stuff pays off in improving our operating system more than if we'd just worked around the bad processes, and hacked on code. Especially given that all the candidates seem devoted to working on process issues rather than our operating system itself, it's important to me to know whether they share that recognition. Unfortunately, just asking doesn't work, since it's traditional for candidates up for election to recognise every concern that's put before them as enormously important, whether that will actually mean anything later or not. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we could. http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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