The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: There is no leadership vaccumm.

[Note, that I've merged three mails into one reply.]

Bruce Perens said:

> Christian,
> 
> Your resignation is not accepted.
[...]

The fact that this objection comes from _you_ (and not our project leader,
which I think would be the right one to comment on this) clearly shows
that we _have_ a lack of leadership right now.

On 8 Dec 1997 bruce@va.debian.org wrote:

[snip]
> Ian Jackson thinks there's a chance that he can succeed in running the
> project democraticaly, and I am willing to support him while he does that.
> I don't think you or I need to step in unless something goes really
> wrong (like _he_ runs out of patience).

That's the key problem. I'm pretty sure that all attempts to run such a
project democratically will fail. Furthermore, I don't think Ian has the
time to do that job (e.g., he hasn't sent an announcement to
debian-announce yet). But all attempts to make this project more
democratically will make the job _much_ harder for the "managers" since
every kind of decision will take a long time. _It's unacceptable to me
that a project leader, who doesn't have much time himself, spends the
little time he has for making the job harder for his managers._ (If you
don't know what I'm talking about, just check out his reactions on the
logo contest.)

Guy Maor said:

> I believe your work as policy manager will fun once again once some of
> the provisions that Ian proposed are put into place.  The technical
> comittee will aid you, and the general voting will prevent the recent
> silliness.

The past has shown me clearly that this "aid" will only be objections when
you did something wrong ("wrong" in the eyes of the comittee or the
project leader). Compared to the time committement of the policy manager
and the new project leader, this is an unacceptable situation for me.

What makes me worry even more, is that the current people on the board
don't even recognize that we have problems now: If the job for the
"managers" gets too hard, they'll leave (remember that we are in a
volunteer organization). 

You are asking what I suggest to do know? 

  1. Splitting the archive into one "basic" part and several "add-ons".
The basic part has to be limited to a reasonable size, e.g., half a CD-ROM
(so that sources and binaries fit on one CD-ROM). There can be several
add-ons (e.g., Perl stuff, TeX stuff, e-texts). 

  2. Cutting down the number of developers to a reasonable amount again. 

     (Some people call this "core" system. Note, that the suggestion does
_not_ mean to that the core team will be a closed group. The development
will still be open and everyone will have the possibility to join the
team. Only the _number of people_ will be limited.)

  3. Getting more people to do the "management" jobs. (Not less, as
proposed by the people who want to have more "democracy".) These new
"managers" need to have the power to make decisions after considering the
opinions of the other developers. The managers should be appointed and
"fired" by the project leader only. Only the project leader should be
elected by the developers. (Note, that it has been this way until now,
except that we had not much managers. But the situation has changed
radically with Bruce' resignment.)

  (list could be continued)

This sounds too radical? We don't have any other choices! I'm sure if we
don't implement this now, we'll end up with an unmanageable group of
developers and far too many packages soon. Releases will never go out in
time and the quality of our distribution (which was once very high) will
decrease rapidly.


Thanks,

Chris

--                 Christian Schwarz
Do you know         schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Debian GNU/Linux?    schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
      
Visit                  PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7  34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
http://www.debian.org   http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/


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