Thu, 22 Sep 2005
On hate and ancient architectures.
Brian Nelson wonders why Debian 'hates' software developers and 'prioritizes ancient architectures over actual progress'.
First, get your facts right. The GCC 3.2 transition (with G++ ABI incompatibility) started on 2003-01-05; it had repercussions until at least 2003-08-14. For those of you who want it spelled out: that's well over seven months (more, since the second post I link to doesn't mark the end of the transition).
Second, apart from a C++ transition we're also facing a major version upgrade of the compiler; we're going from 3.x to 4.x. Meaning, a lot of fairly new code, and quite some regressions. This happened when GCC 3.0 was first introduced, too; however, we didn't have a G++ transition going on back then, so most people didn't even notice (except for the few unlucky ones who happened to hit an ICE).
Third, apart from the above problems, m68k is/was also facing a rather largish backlog due to it not being able to keep up with the transition, rather than its toolchain being broken. That problem is being addressed; in fact, the backlog has now been reduced from about 350 packages a week ago to 192 as of this writing, which is rather impressive (in fairness, I should also add that we've got 181 packages in state Failed, who will need to be rebuilt once our compiler has been fixed—and that might happen rather soon).
The point being that it's easy to bitch about 'ancient architectures' holding back the rest of Debian (especially when it's true, as unfortunately is the case right now); but that isn't helpful. All architectures will be problematic every once in a while; this is normal and to be expected. As long as it doesn't happen too often, I don't think it's unreasonable.
Hell, the arm people decided to throw out all packages because they need to change their ABI in an incompatible way. Talk about being disruptive...
Playing police will not work
So there's now a Debian Tech channel. Apparently, some people thought there was need for a channel where we're all nice and friendly rather than start attacking eachother; and if you're not like that, you might get kicked out of there.
This isn't the first proposal from aj that involves forcefully being nice to eachother and policing those who're not doing so, but I don't think it's going to work. Debian has never done this; if you suddenly start making up such rules and request that people keep their temper, those people will just go somewhere else to cool off; and you'll lose the possibility for consensus that is so important for whatever Debian wants to accomplish.
I agree that our constant bickering isn't the most productive way to get things done; Debian would be so much more pleasant if everyone would just be nice to eachother. Unfortunately, Debian is a large group of largely unorganized people. It's actually normal in such a case that people fight every now and then—many of us are very passionate about what we do, and want the Debian system to be the best system out there. Which is good; it is one of the reasons why Debian actually is such a good system. But invariably, when so many people get to have a say about so many things, with everyone being basically equal (or at least, mostly so) as is the case for Debian, you'll have conflicts every now and then.
I can see two ways to handle that:
- Do not do anything. Accept the fact that there are fights every now and then, and deal with them; do remind yourself every now and then that these are all just bits and bytes, however, and do not hold grudges; or,
- Give some people more authority than others. We already have this (to some extent) in that people who 'do the work' get to decide, but when there's more than one person (of group of people) 'doing the work', there's currently a conflict of interest, and, as a reasult, heavy bickering. We could give some people the authority to make a judgement call in such a situation, but then you'd eventually end up with a corporate-type hierarchy that at least I myself would like to avoid.
It's also not quite unlikely that it gives more power to those who're first. I could come up with a proposal that would kill off whatever stuff you're trying to accomplish, while there's a different way to accomplish the same thing; you, being passionate about what you do, would go on and rant about it in some public space. Then you would be shut up by the "be nice" police, and my proposal would be implemented.
With the status quo, I would come up with the same proposal. You'd rant about it in public. I'd need to defend my proposal, which I'll do just as passionate, and we'll have a flamwar on a mailinglist from here to Tokio. In the end, we'd both be a bit less happy with what Debian has become, but -and this is important- either the status quo will be retained or a compromise will be found and could be implemented. It's not totally efficient, but it does work.
And really, forcing people to be nice—"or else!"...? That won't accomplish anything, really; it's just a different way of generally not being nice to eachother.
The question you should ask before implementing police states is "is this police going to add value to whatever we do," not "is this police going to make us happier?"
Even if being happy with what you do is, of course, generally desirable.
Slow serial links
Get: 1 ftp://ftp.uni-oldenburg.de unstable/main Packages [3565kB] 14% [1 Packages 550296/3565kB 15%] 1183B/s 41m51s
Doing an update from Sarge to unstable over a 37600bps serial PPP link might not be a very good idea
