Debian Doesn't Hate Their Utopia Team - Reply

As my reply to Doug’s post seems to be stuck in moderation oblivion (and has been for the past two days) I thought I would just make it a post on my blog instead, and may be extend it a little. My original reply was (in italics),

I would like to point out that I have worked with you in the past on KDE issues when you have been less than polite. Others have made comments on the way in which you ask people to do things and I have to agree that you could do with working on that a bit. I will continue to work on making KDE just work, and I do work with Gnome herd members where necessary and spent significant time working the on the hal/dbus stuff.

I also work on amd64 stabling as do several other members of the architecture team. I wouldn’t say that stable has been abandoned, but there are certainly places where it has. In my roles in the scientific and KDE herds I work towards stabilising packages in reasonable time frames and always aim to have stuff in ~arch working. Where there is doubt it goes in p.mask or an external testing tree. I will work with anyone who has similar goals even if they don’t always communicate them in the best way.

I would certainly agree that there are areas that we can improve and the Gentopia concept is a worthwhile one if implemented in the right way. Most of us are also volunteers though and I don’t have very much free time until the end of January. Unfortunately this means that my productivity will drop until that time. This is why we have herds and there are quite a few KDE and Gnome herd members I keep in regular contact with.

There have certainly been packages in the past that have taken far too long to be included or updated but that seems to be improving as far as I can tell. If Gentopia helps improve this situation I am all for it, but I have not seen that many results from it thus far. From the KDE side I will continue to work with the Gnome herd and/or Gentopia. I think all of us would like a desktop that just worked whatever desktop environment we choose. As always patches are more than welcome