The last couple of weeks in MOTU

Reinhard Tartler siretart at tauware.de
Fri Jan 20 10:42:36 GMT 2006


Am Donnerstag, den 19.01.2006, 13:11 +0100 schrieb Stephan Hermann:
> I write this email to explain, why I'm a bit disappointed in the last couple 
> of weeks with the mood around our Universe.

I also feel some sort of strange disappointment, from your side as well
as from others. Your email make some points more clear, but to be
honest, some other points confuse me a bit. Let's talk about them in
detail.

> But, not all the time there is sunshine, so I have to express my thoughts now, 
> what is in my eyes completly nonsense, and makes the work for MOTUs not so 
> enjoyable, as it was before.

I disagree. I enjoy being a MOTU nearly as in my first times. I did not
notice a significant increase in numbers of MOTUs who actively work on
ubuntu/universe. However, the absolute numbers of the MOTU team has
increased significantly, resulting in more discussion, which I enjoy in
general.

> I have to admit, that working in a team without the usual rules is not 
> possible, but too many rules is no good for a team like us.
> To be honest, I was surprised, when some wiki pages about collaboration came 
> up, and very political discussions were coming up. 

TBH, I find this thread itself the most political discussion the last
weeks. Most discussions about contributing back to debian I've had the
last weeks, had the objective to get a maintainable and manageable
ubuntu/universe component.

> Yes, I know, we can try to decrease the workload of the MOTUs, when we file 
> bugs towards debian about our changes, but sometimes this is not the way how 
> it works. 
> 
> My view of all this is, that we, working on Ubuntu, our first duty is Ubuntu. 
> Making Ubuntu the best distribution around is our first goal. Our second goal 
> could be, to make Debian the 2nd best distribution around ;)

And this kind of competition is what makes me sad in this thread. I
don't think ubuntu and debian should compete each other but collaborate.
In my room, above my monitor is a big debian poster "The universal OS".
That's one big and important point to me: Debian is equally about being
'universal', 'free' (as in speech) and as well 'usable for their users'.
Ubuntu however, is very successful because it want to be a 'free'
distribution, which 'just works'. Ubuntu does not try to be as
'universal' as debian in various fields.

In the end: there is definitely some divergence that we want and that is
healthy and prosper for ubuntu. We should definitely have a focus on
these packages.

However, there are many parts, espc. in ubuntu/universe, which have
excatly the same goals as debian. So working on these fields in debian
does help both distributions equally. This is a point, which we did not
care much in the past. I want to change this. For the sake of the
distribution we love most: Ubuntu. 

Is this statement political? I don't really care if this is political or
not. What I want is to improve ubuntu. This can be done sometimes by
working on debian, and I want to focus on this. If some others think the
same like me, great, I think we are on the right way. If you rather
focus on working on ubuntu goals, great! You are perhaps helping ubuntu
more than I do, but this is highly subjective and depends on the POV.

> I know, we have several Debian Developers and Package Maintainers in our team, 
> and I appreaciate their goal to decrease the divergence between Ubuntu and 
> Debian, but please don't force it onto other people. 

Ok, now you make an explicit call. I looked at my uploads to dapper, and
I feel guilty that I introduced too much unnecessary divergence into
ubuntu. This is bad, because it means additional merge work the next
release cycle. I think we lost way to much energy, motivation and people
with working on merges, so let's try to work on this. And regarding to
our current recruiting efforts, I don't see much other choice.

> And we should stop this nonsense about politics and flames and ranting about 
> others, who have nothing to do directly with Universe or Ubuntu.

I absolutely agree. There are too many discussion with unhealthy
language and attitude, on both the debian and ubuntu side.

> So, I hope my thoughts are ok to share with you, and it's the last mail about 
> this for me. There is nothing to discuss about this anymore, and I'll refuse 
> to talk about this in the future.

And this is the point which make me most sad. Divergence is a technical
problem, and not a political, and it doesn't change on how often you
call that political. The amount of work we have spent on merges is
something which annoys me. I had rather spent much more time on
reviewing stuff from MOTU hopefuls in order to increase the number of
MOTUs. 

\sh, you scare me. Besides the problems in Montreal, I really enjoyed
the week with you, so I can call you a personal friend. But in the last
weeks, you sound really frustrated, I think they are mostly because of
bad experience you had in the past with gentoo, debian and personal
matters. You scare me because I have the feeling that this discussion
could end in ubuntu loosing you as a great contributor and me loosing a
good friend. Please don't let that happen!

> I don't know how you feel about the last days/weeks change of mood in the MOTU 
> team, I would say, express yourself here, or whereever you think it's 
> appropriate, but let's stop all discussions about the matters of Debian or of 
> Mr. Smith. 

Mr. Smith?

-- 
Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de>
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