Debian's Challenge When Its Developers Drift Away
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
- Combining open source developers outside the core development regions and major cultural spheres could potentially secure roughly as many contributors as the entire US. - Funding shortages for non-profit foundations are deeply entrenched. Denying or attempting to fix this immediately becomes greed. - It is possible to manage language barriers, cultural barriers, and guidelines for distant countries without becoming a greedy for-profit entity. - This does not mean holding DebConf in every country. However, if the awareness is simply that ‘there used to be no borders, but now it's different from the 90s’ regarding the shortage of personnel, then improvements should be more proactive. - The 2020s are no longer an era of romanticism where one flies from Angola to Germany just for the sake of romance. - Especially as Debian has established itself as an invisible system, becoming the backbone of countless cloud services, there is less room for romanticism to intervene.
I've used Debian since 2015 and have had no complaints during that time. Korea also had ‘administrators’ who spared no expense on plane tickets for GNU since the 90s, but most have now stepped down due to age, or, exhausted from trying to salvage communities torn apart by toxic members, have turned around and declared ‘BSD was right’. However, the project's sustainability deteriorating due to a ‘lack of administrators’ is definitely something that needs to be considered. If sufficient people cannot be recruited, and given that we cannot extend the freeze cycle like Slackware at present, communication between upstream and downstream and the active recruitment of multinational developers are important to resolve the complaints of ‘dependent families’ like Ubuntu.
I guess my comment is kinda messy, hm..Anyway, thanks for the reminder. Have a good day!
:)
perhaps nobody would waste their life volunteering on such crockery. this is not a task for a developer but a mindless apparatchik
Dude I play eve online! We compete for these unpaid space jobs where you have to read reports and click a button on a website without even logging into the game.
Heck I play with at least one ports commit guy from a bsd
Being on social media is very relevant due to both content discovery algorithms being able to connect people who may be interested in the project with the project itself and because social media sites can have things go viral outside of your own personal reach. Your post can reposted or spread by other accounts easier if its originating from the platform itself instead of hopping someone sees it and copies onto the platform.
Holing up in mailing lists definitely isn't going to help with pulling in users or devs.
[1] although it was maybe specifically just me they weren’t trying to attract.
[2] to the point where I actually worked with someone in my day job who was a debian dev and he wouldn’t sign my key without me producing physical official ID like a passport or something. Just really bizarre level of paranoia like a government kyc process or something.
People should only sign a key under at least two conditions:
The key owner convinces the signer that the identity in the UID is indeed their own identity by whatever evidence the signer is willing to accept as convincing. Usually this means the key owner must present a government issued ID with a picture and information that match up with the key owner. (Some signers know that government issued ID's are easily forged and that the trustability of the issuing authorities is often suspect and so they may require additional and/or alternative evidence of identity).
The key owner verifies that the fingerprint and the length of the key about to be signed is indeed their own.
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...debian is INDEED old-school and slightly derpy (see their use of the condorcet voting method), but it has boded extremely well for their longevity. Debian exists for its users, and its users are generally developers.
You recall it incorrectly. You need that for becoming a Debian Maintainer and gaining direct upload rights, but for contributing a package you only need to have it sponsored by a Debian Developer.