Debian Quality and Releases

Sticking with the theme that blogs are all about completely biased and probably controversial opinion and not much else, I'm glad that Thomas has made his thoughts clear. Thomas - I fully agree (but your blog doesn't support comments, so I'm putting it here).

Debian, to me, needs to about Quality over quantity (being very aggressive over orphaned packages and their reverse dependencies) and about everyone working towards the releases. Not to pick arbitrary time-based deadlines for releases but actively fixing release-critical bugs, so that the release can proceed smoothly with stable, reliable packages. Debian developers who feel unable to fix release critical bugs maybe should not be developers any more - or at least be banned from mailing lists on lists.debian.org which appear to be the only "contribution" being made.

There's no reason to continue using Gtk1.2 and no point in complaining about it because there is no prospect of anyone stepping up to maintain gtk1.2 itself. There is therefore no point in the long threads complaining about removing gtk1.2 because nobody is going to do any work to retain gtk1.2.

If you aren't prepared to do the work, you should not feel you have any rights to complain about the lack of such work being done. We're all volunteers - don't expect someone else to sift the wheat from the chaff, get rid of your own cruft. Debian needs to be an association of people who do, not the current association of people who complain, moan and generally fight amongst themselves. The answer to this negativity is a can-do attitude - it is not as if there aren't enough problems out there to fix, get out there and raise the quality. (First though, get Lenny released.)

Not everyone can do the same amount of workload but within the work that you are able to do, there must be a balance between the work you do for yourself and the work you do for the distribution. I'm not expecting people to have to match my levels of output, I am expecting people to match the proportion of time that they allocate to fixing problems outside their own limited niche. If that proportion approaches zero then maybe Debian doesn't need you any more.

There is no reason to have project members who do not contribute to either quality or releases - that doesn't just mean not fixing bugs, it means not being a part of any team or other group in Debian that provides support for general quality or the release.

If you aren't fussed about the quality of packages (in general, not just your own) and aren't willing to contribute just a small amount of your time to use your privileges to fix release-critical issues, then those privileges should be removed - you obviously don't need them. (Also, if you aren't a DD yet and you want sponsorship, these rules apply to you too. I won't sponsor people who have no feel for quality or want to help Debian make releases. I'm beginning to wish other sponsors would do the same. Quality is far more important than quantity - merely adding packages because they exist and because someone posts a request for a sponsor is insufficient. Completely insufficient, counter-productive too. See my sponsorship requirements.)

Note: this post is entirely opinionated and I don't care if you disagree. I will take a particularly brutal approach to comments that do not grasp this fact.