I don't know if Aaron is an Ubuntu Developer. I hope not. And I hope that no one of the commenters is one. But this post and especially the comments to it (because the article may have some justification) is certainly not a way to improve the relationship between projects like Ubuntu and the projects its based on.
Yes, it is true, that we have a rough tone in our mailing lists and yes it is sad that every now and then topics pop up that need to be discussed till somebody is hurt and leaves (the project). I certainly hope that this can be improved over the time, but most likely this is not something which breaks the project. Who knows what its worth. We have a large community, very much different opinions and therefore conflicts. Possibly it enhances the quality of our distribution, because things that certainly would make our product worse (e.g. lowering quality standards) won't get done, because they'll get a strong opposition.
But whats the point with the innovations, Aaron? Is it the job of a distribution to serve with innovations? A distribution that serves as a base for more then 10 other distributions? A distribution that is known to care a lot about freedom and is known (and appreciated) for a high quality standard. I don't think we need to serve innovations. We served innovations back in a time where it was needed. Where things were missing. Like a good package management, like conf.d directories. Apart from this I think there were enough innovations in the past years. Possibly not that user-visible and trendy as a graphical virtualization frontend. What about xen-tools for example?
Now its all about reinventing the wheel or developing frontends. Launchpad for example is just reinventing the wheel. Savannah exists, GForge exists. Bazaar is just reinventing the wheel. Git exists. So does Mercurial.
But whats most sad about your posts and the comments is that you (and your commentors) seem to share the opinion that all Debian does is packaging software and nothing more. According to you Debian developers do not fix bugs, forward patches, file (important) wishlist bugs, encourage upstreams to remove horribly broken licensed software, improve their own software and tools (dpkg, aptitude, apt-get, the devscripts, ....), do integration work (alternatives, $EDITOR usage, ...), documentation work (writing manpages). The reality is that there are many small and greater things driven by Debian Developers that serve the whole community. Additional to the ground work that your favorite operating system is based on and without which it could not exist.
Its just not beeing doped like it is done by companies with their marketing departments that actually earn money with what they do. Take the projects you named. They all have one. They all have paid developers.
In any way such a ranting (with no real constructiveness) will not serve the relationships between other projects and Debian.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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9 comments:
You are clearly over reacting, the post basically states "When Debian fails to realesse it looses credibility", and "In my view I've only seen freeness contributed from Debian". Thoose statements are also very sugar coated, they could be alot harsher.
It's good that you mention things that Debian have brought to the scene. Not sure it invalidates what he writes about though..
It seems so, because I heard this twice now. But I'm not very sure that is true.
I just stated what I think is wrong in his article and foremost in the comments (which are the worst thing of the whole).
Please notice that I take reference on the whole, not only on the article. And if you read Aarons comments then he has a more bad opinion as the points you've stated.
I think that yes, Debian has problems and yes they need solving. But the way to point the fingers at Debian is not fair.
Aaron just completely misses the one point where Debian excels above every single other distribution out there: Dirty groundwork. Quality, side-effect-free packages and upgradability. Systems that, once set up, just work (tm).
Aaron Toponce is a Ubuntu member:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AaronToponce
You may want to re-read the comments Patrick, some of them are quite positive! :)
Miriam,
thanks for enlightening me in this point.
Jeremiah,
yep, some are (foremost some more since I posted this). Still the majority of comments is negative with little to no substance. That is what made me sad.
Debian do lots of really dirty works (e.g. make X11 build on MIPS) that no one notice.
FWIW, Bazaar is older than Git and about the same age as Mercurial, so I can hardly see how it is reinventing it.
I think part of the problem is that the project-wide channels of communication, what people watch to see what's happening in the project, are dominated by a small group of people, some of them not even members of Debian, who enjoy talking for its own sake. I don't mean to imply that they're organized, or even that there's necessarily anything wrong with idle chitchat, but it's drowned out everything else lately. It's also worrying that some of them are a little aggressive and speak more authoritatively than they ought to, which I call the Slashdot Syndrome (I'm being vague both to avoid personalizing it, and because I don't remember which names belong to these problems; I'm not in the habit of carrying around scores, even if it's popular around here lately).
That's true on -devel, I assume it's true on -project (don't read that list), and it's certainly true on Planet Debian. In fact, the only Debian lists I'm subscribed to that are really worth reading are project-specific lists and debian-user.
As a result, people like the author of the linked article can get the impression that Debian does nothing but yell at itself and obsess over removing non-free material.
In fact, there are a lot of people doing work, but they tend to be working in relative obscurity without making much fanfare and ignoring all the noise on the major lists (because if they took the time to talk about what they were doing, they wouldn't have the time to actually do it). In order to see the work that goes on you have to go to the places where the work is taking place, and that generally isn't debian-devel.
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