DPL Campaign Questions 010
Secondly, I was wondering how Debian could make it easier for people to contribute than other (derivatives and non-derivatives) distributions. I came up with a really nice draft howto[1] which I would like to bring up to your attention, so the basic question would be what do you think you could do to make contributions paths easier (take in account not all teams, groups follow such community guidelines)
Human beings are not computers, so I find that applying HOWTOs to them to be misguided at best. As for enforcing a set of arbitrary community guidelines, I would not do that.
planet.d.o has became one of the most visible media for Debian, if not the most visible one. Do you think it is a good thing?
I consider it neutral. If people start thinking of blogs or microblogging as important though, I think we might have a problem.
I am in favor of our informal policy to never post anything important on blogs unless it is merely a copy of something communicated properly on an official channel. This includes anything that would go into our packages. Consequently I do not think it a valuable goal to respect copyright law by enforcing DFSG-free licenses on blogs, whether they are aggregated or not.
One of the questions which I've not yet seen exactly in the discussions is on the transparency in the maintenance of non-core but "important" packages, such as python, wherein the maintenance of the package and policy (till a short while ago) has been, poor at best, and we've had near zero communication from the maintainer(s) for over a year. This has led some parts of the "community" (Debian Python, in this case) to knock the doors of the tech-ctte[1] (recommended reading, unless you have done so already).
I think that is a failure of the entire community that the situation has even come to this point. In other analogous situations, the package would have been hijacked by now and the situation resolved.
I think it would be appropriate for the DPL either to step in and mediate situations like this before they get anywhere near the tech-ctte, or to delegate someone to do the same. I think it would be equally appropriate for the people involved to resolve this themselves. Of course all of this should be open.