Free as in speech

It’s 11:30pm right now, I spent the whole day coding and can’t sleep even though I’m tired. The only thing I can focus on right now is Debian and the complete mess the Project is trying not to become. So here we go.

Following tbm’s last posts about DPLship, I think he’s right. It’s pretty obvious, the last few DPLs did not take any real decisions and we’ve become quite used to that. Saying that the Project is on the road to self-destruction may be a slight exaggeration right now, but that’s what we’ll end up with if we don’t react soon. The good news is, the DPL election is in the process. The bad news is, we don’t know yet if one of the candidates will be able to carry out much of the processes needed to get the Project back into shape. We’ll find out eventually.

Before doing anything, we need a clear picture of the Project as it is today; nobody can claim that today, Joey’s resignation as SRM proves it: nobody knows what the fuck did or did not happen between Joey and ftpmasters, and there’s probably a metric fuckton of gory details to take into account too.

So, getting a clear picture of the state of the Project. In one word: audit. Ask every individual delegate for a detailed, comprehensive status report including all the details, including sensitive ones — obviously those reports will be sent to the DPL. No report, and that’s one less delegate. Don’t ask for team reports, they’re biased; getting X copies of the same report from team members is out of the question too.

While they’re at it, ask each delegate to reaffirm its commitment, or appoint somebody else. Play by the rules or get replaced (by a little shell script, wherever possible).

Based on the information collected through those reports, decide a plan of action and discuss it with the delegates. Once the decision is taken, announce it, get some feedback, then implement it. Remember: always consider the Project as a whole.

The only problem is, this may well take more than one DPL term to achieve.

It’s so fucking simple and we’re so fucking incapable of doing it. Sit back, look at things the way they are. Pity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Debian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.