Distribution quotes of the week

Does Debian measure its success by the number of installs? The number of maintainers? The number of flamewars? The number of packages? The number of messages to mailing lists? The quality of Debian Policy? The quality of packages? The "freshness" of packages? The length and quality of maintenance of releases? The frequency or infrequency of releases? The breadth of derivatives?

Many of these metrics are in direct tension with one another; as a consequence, the fact that different DD's prioritise all of these (and other goals) differently makes for ... interesting debate. The sort of debate that goes on and on because there is no way to choose between the goals when everyone has different ones. You know the sort of debate I mean :-)

The above is why I'm constantly encouraging people interested in running for DPL in the future to reach out to me and work on some tasks of the current DPL's TODO list. I swear it is not just a cheap attempt at slavery!. It is rather an attempt at DPL mentoring that could be beneficial: both to give future candidates more awareness of the task, and to reduce the potential downtime when handing over from one DPL to the next.