Hi Colin! You wrote:
> What the exact steps should be to accomplish this goal aren't completely > clear to me, and I doubt they are to anyone else either. We have come a > long way, but there is a lot more to do. Just for example, take the > thread about Euro support. Certainly, Europe is part of the Universe > which we want to support. So, all of Debian needs to support the Euro. > Well, how do we do that? For some programs this may require something > as trivial as setting an environment variable, but for others it could > be quite complex, requiring code/program design changes. So even the > steps to getting to full Euro support aren't well defined. > > For something even more nebulous, how about *full* Unicode support? > Even a goal that upon a cursory glance seems as concrete as "a full > replacement for Microsoft Word" has innumerable substeps. The problem here is IMHO that while such large projects (unicode support, hardware detection, full debconf support, etc) require effort and thought from _all_ debian developers, while at the moment, they are given thought and are being worked on by _individual_ developers only. Our infrastructure should be such that the ideas of those indivuals are easily picked up and concretized. > I think Debian is really defined not by its internal structure, or even > things like the Social Contract or the DFSG, but by the people, who > choose what to work on at will. We have to have some concrete > definition (i.e. policy, the DFSG), of course, or things would > disintegrate into chaos, but just creating structure doesn't make people > work on filling it in. Sure, I do of course agree with you that everyone should be able to work on whatever part of Debian he/she wants. This is IMO one of the greatest advances of the Debian organisation. We don't want to go to a situation in which an imaginary "Debian Chairman" could order somebody to do something. However, we should have a system to detect which parts of Debian need attention and in what part things go wrong. -- Kind regards, +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Bas Zoetekouw | Si l'on sait exactement ce | |--------------------------------| que l'on va faire, a quoi | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | bon le faire? | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Pablo Picasso | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
