Debian's Challenge When Its Developers Drift Away
50 points
5 hours ago
| 4 comments
| phoronix.com
| HN
karteum
2 hours ago
[-]
I am not native english so maybe it's just me, but I think the title is misleading because it suggests that Debian could be struggling with a situation where developers would massively drift away (my first reaction was "what ?? is there really a significant amount of devs that are leaving Debian now, and why ?"), while actually it's more a discussion on how to bring awareness to a team and encourage developers to better communicate with colleagues when they have a life change that would lower their commitment (which can happen to anyone, and in any project), so that the project can better handle when a developer "drifts away".
reply
variaga
2 hours ago
[-]
I am a native English speaker, and it's not just you.
reply
charcircuit
1 hour ago
[-]
When Debian is making decisions to abandon social media accounts which give them reach outside of their own bubble from the 90s consisting of mailing lists and irc it is hard to see there be a sustainable future for the project.
reply
notepad0x90
48 minutes ago
[-]
I'm confused, are you saying Debian shouldn't abandon social media accounts? Are there people following distros on social media to where it's that relevant?
reply
charcircuit
28 minutes ago
[-]
I am saying that if you have an outlet where your posts are getting 10 to 20 thousand impressions, the most impressions out of any other channel of communication you should not abandon it.

Being on social media is very relevant due to both content discovery algorithms being able to connect people who may be interested in the project with the project itself and because social media sites can have things go viral outside of your own personal reach. Your post can reposted or spread by other accounts easier if its originating from the platform itself instead of hopping someone sees it and copies onto the platform.

reply
MuffinFlavored
30 minutes ago
[-]
Letting Claude summarize my thoughts for me on this:

Genuine respect to anyone doing thankless package maintenance for free. But maybe the real problem isn't that Debian volunteers go quiet — it's that we have 100 distros on DistroWatch and half of them are the same thing with a different wallpaper?

reply
calvinmorrison
1 hour ago
[-]
Debian's Data Protection Team was established back in 2018 for dealing with European data protection legislation like the GDPR.

perhaps nobody would waste their life volunteering on such crockery. this is not a task for a developer but a mindless apparatchik

reply
jonway
57 minutes ago
[-]
Hahaha

Dude I play eve online! We compete for these unpaid space jobs where you have to read reports and click a button on a website without even logging into the game.

Heck I play with at least one ports commit guy from a bsd

reply