I have talked earlier about the crumbling consensus in Debian, which was nice, but did not delve deep enough into the reasons for the crumbling tendency to try to arrive at an consensus.
I can see bunches of people jumping up and down screaming
communication! communication! communication!
. Yes, but; have
people complaining about lack of communication ever looked for a
cause why communication in the project has deteriorated (and no,
frequent flame—fests do not count as communication)?
The facile explanation is that people who fail to communicate, or fail to respond, are either overly busy (which does not hold water since the people examples being flouted are actually doing visible and often extensive work), just plain lazy (again, easily refuted), impossible to communicate with (and there are equal examples of people who have no problem communicating with the same people), or just plain secretive and malicious and holding a grudge against people.
With my experience with people in the project, I find it hard to credit the theory that people are strongly for a hidden, secret big boy club in Debian. Despite recurrent and no longer funny references (always unsubstantiated) about a Debian Cabal, I have not yet found any actual instantiation of the so called super secretive cabal. I know these folks, guys, and I am not buying a super secretive cabal.
But surely there must be some fire under all this smoke, right? Yes, but not in the manner that people think, I suspect.
I think the same phenomena is at work that causes lack of consensus efforts in Debian; and the root cause is partially the growth of the project (resulting in people no longer being acquainted with the other participants), and the perception of Debian as an faceless institution, rather than a convivial set of people trying to have fun and put together a distribution focussed on excellence.
I say this, since I have seen the growing tendency to treat classes of volunteers as faceless, nameless, institutions: we talk about DAM’s, ftp-masters, list-masters — anonymous, faceless, institutions that one may then chastise with little need to cater to their feeling (since when do institutions have feelings?). This is a similar phenomena to people treating other cars far more rudely than they would if they were talking to the driver face to face. The increasing hostility, expressed as increasingly pointless flame wars, and increasingly hostile mails to the people in visible positions in Debian (often verging to obnoxiously rude demands), whittle away at the motivation of the people doing additional work in Debian beyond their packages.
Now, given that most developers do not care to do more than cater to their own packages (the DPL has said several teams, including security, are overworked, and have been asking for volunteers. Policy has been looking for new blood as well, and I have been lucky enough to find one person who actually started out by doing the scut work, rather than ask for spoon feeding and a gilt-edg4ed invitation) — we have a few people putting in far more labour into the project, above and beyond the talk of maintaining packages. The tasks these people perform is becoming increasingly thankless, to the point a few have taken to ignoring the most unpleasant communication in the interests of sanity. Since they respond still to nicer communications, it may appear there is a cabal — but this is basic human nature, avoiding experiences that have, in the past, proven to be unpleasant and unproductive.
So what do I propose? The same thing I proposed before: I suggest that we try not to lose sight of who we are fundamentally: we are a group of people who have found common cause to volunteer our time to make the best OS out there. Treat developers like people. I would like to think we are a bunch of folks having fun — and working together for what is still a common goal. Look at the big picture. Don’t let the end goal be lost in the petty details.