Hey,
Chris Lamb here, Debian Project Leader. As a bit of background, I've been around the "startup" scene on and off, even participating in YCombinator during S12. I have a few side projects here and there and I also do a lot of full-stack web development using Python/Django.
I'm very much interested in soliciting your feedback and feature requests for the Debian 10 ("buster") development cycle which opens up tomorrow after the release of "stretch" today. This is obviously a shameless appropriation of Ubuntu's post a few months ago and some requests would definitely overlap but I feel we could get some interesting replies nonetheless.
Please include in your replies the following bullets:
- HEADLINE: 1-line description of the request
- DESCRIPTION: A lengthier description of the feature. Bonus points for constructive criticism...
- DISTRIBUTION: (Optional) [stable, testing, unstable, or even a Debian deriviative]
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)
We would be exteremely interested in your feedback! Everything is fair game -- kernel, security, community, default settings, architectures, init systems (!), desktop, Docker, documentation, default packages, cloud images, etc. etc.. Feel free to comment even if you are using a Debian derivative such as Ubuntu, Mint, etc. too.
Thanks, HN!
—lamby
https://twitter.com/lolamby
- DESCRIPTION: TL;DR: Debian's web pages are hard to navigate and use and it's very hard to see what's happening.
I contribute to FOSS projects whenever I have time and have been wanting to contribute to Debian, but the difficulty is offputting. I'm used to searching for the program name and arriving at a portal page from which I can easily browse the source, see the current problems and instantly start interacting with the community. Unfortunately, contributing to Debian seems to require in-depth knowledge about many systems and arcane email commands. As a would-be contributor this completely alienates me.
One reason is that Debian has many independent services: lintian, mailing lists, manpages (which btw are fantastic and give me hope), Wiki, CI, alioth, the package listing, BTS, etc. To contribute, you need to learn most of them and For example, searching a package name gives me a page at packages.debian.org, but it's very hard to navigate or even discover the other services from there. I can't easily see if there are any lintian issues, critical bugs or current discussions. Additionally, I find most of the systems very hard to use (I still can't figure out the mailing list archives). Ideally, these services would be more tightly integrated.
Another big reason Debian is very hard to contribute to is the main discussion takes place via mailing lists. I understand that many people enjoy working with them, but for light usage they are a big pain. Submitting and history are in completely different programs, there seems to be no real threading, volume is often high and reading large amounts of emails is a chore to me. A solution here would be an improved mailing list archive with options for replying directly integrated to the site.
- DISTRIBUTION: unstable
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Student