Gerfried Fuchs:
I have a question to the candidates: History has shown that DPLs more
or less disappear not too long after their period or at least reduce
their visible efforts immensly. I wonder where you see the reasons for
this trend, what your impression is about it and wether you try to
follow that trend or what you will try to do to not have this happen to
you, too.
I think that some DPLs are overwhelmed by the amount of requests
they receive, and more importantly, are overwhelmed by the feeling
of futility from perceiving that it is impossible to fix the things
that they had intended to fix.
So, unless there are other factors I would need to adapt to, I would
try to discourage the number of private requests, and to not lose
hope and faith in Debian. I imagine that delegation could be
very useful in both these areas.
Gunnar Wolf:
What would be different if there was no leader? Where would the
project lose more? Would it gain in some aspect?
The DPL is theoretically one of the most important checks against
the power of delegates. The absence of a DPL would thus increase
any power imbalance in the the project, and likely to make the
fighting between core teams even more political and harmful.
Communities and teams are destabilized by egos because people stop
paying attention to their healthy shared goals and the people around
them and instead focus on their own individual success. So if the project
were to achieve some kind of anarchic utopia where this is not
an issue, I could imagine that the DPL would be the last remaining
ego threat, and removing that role would make things better.
However, we are nowhere near that now, and I think the DPL can
do more good on this front.
Yavor Doganov:
What do you think the project should do (with or without or regardless
of your help as potential DPL) to preserve this goodness (maximum
supported architectures) for as long as possible? Do you think it is
"goodness" or you're in the "good riddance" camp?
I definitely think that one of our strengths is being available on
a large number of architectures, and beyond that, providing nearly
identical experiences on each of those platforms. I am saddened
when porters or package maintainers make decisions to stray from
the norm on a particular architecture, because I truly enjoy the
consistency. I have run Debian on i386, sparc, hppa, powerpc,
amd64, and in the few cases where something was different, I found
it irksome.
However, there is definitely a point where the cost in maintaining
a release architecture far exceeds the benefit, and at that time
I think we must regretfully bid it farewell.
So you are right that porters are a precious resource, and as DPL
I would try to reduce their attrition. Speaking as a former porter,
I found the unresponsiveness and uncooperativeness of certain
buildd maintainers (especially when not porters themselves) to be
extremely demotivating. I would try to find a way mitigate
porters being demotivated in such a way.
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in March) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
Debian Games
since most of the 