DPL Campaign Questions 009
With respect to attracting new contributors, please ponder the idea of a formal one-on-one mentoring scheme (as opposed to one-off interactions via d-mentors).
I see nothing particularly objectionable about this. A long time ago people were talking about replacing NM with a saner mentoring process, and I am certain that mentoring occurs unofficially. I see no reason that you could not set up a formal one-on-one mentoring infrastructure with or without the Project's blessing.
So my question to other candidates is simple: what is your opinion and program about membership?
I think that we have enough inequality in the project as it is. That is why I consider DM to be a bad thing, even though it has practical benefits.
I think that NM is probably fundamentally broken, and I get a bit nervous when people are talking about increasing the amount of NM indoctrination or bureaucracy. I would be in favor of exploring the replacement of NM with some kind of mentorship-type process, though I would worry it would not scale. I would be in favor of exploring the replacement of NM with something like Lars's proposal a while back, though I would worry that it would encourage popularity contests and cliques and cabals.
1/ Do you believe that it's a good move to standardize our packaging tools? (example: debhelper is almost standard, quilt is gaining status of the standard patch system thanks to the new source format)
3/ Do you have any preference on the tools that we should try to standardize on (which source format/patch system, dh7/CDBS/yada/etc., VCS helper, etc.)?
4/ Organizing changes that have an impact on (a large part of|all) the archive is very difficult:
How can we change our processes so that doing/organizing such changes is less of a burden?
5/ I have the feeling that Debian is innovating less than it used to do. We are more often followers rather than leaders.
Do you share that feeling?
What shall we do to make that change?
1/ I think that we should standardize on dpkg-dev. If there are features which absolutely every package needs, it would seem the logical place to add them.
3/ Right now I wish everyone were using git, but I do not believe in forcing them. Of the available source formats, I like 3.0 (quilt) with no additional patch system, and no package helpers at all. I am not quite sure what a VCS helper is so I have no known preference to express.
4/ I am not sure whether or not what you are talking about should, in fact, be less of a burden, and why it should or should not, so I do not have a valid opinion on how to change the process.
5/ I do share that feeling. I think that sometimes we get bullied by Ubuntu when there are things we would do for our own benefit which would make their lives difficult. I think that people are generally resistant to change, even when it would be of little cost to them and great benefit to someone else. These problems are social and might be correctable with a better spirit of teamwork and cooperation.
However, I do not think we should be innovating just for innovation's sake or to be known as the most innovative kid on the block. We should be making my favorite operating system.