Debian maintainer dissatisfied with the Debian development process and announced the exit
Yesterday, a Debian package maintainer named Michael Stapelberg published a long article on his personal blog announcing that he would gradually reduce the maintenance and related activities involved in Debian and explain why this was done.
Stapelberg mentioned the feelings of attending a Debian meetup a few weeks ago. He said that the theme of the discussion was basically the same as it was a few years ago, which made him start to reflect on whether he is still suitable to stay in Debian and continue to participate in maintenance. Eventually, Stapelberg announced a decision he thought he should have made: exit Debian maintenance.
Stapelberg said he spent more than a decade on Debian and started as a student, so he has a lot of spare time. Since then, the Debian development team has also learned a lot of knowledge for five years of full-time work, including how large software engineering projects work and personal computer systems that they like.
At the same time, however, Stapelberg gradually discovered and recognized the shortcomings of Debian in many aspects. He found that Debian’s entire development evaluation process was very slow. For example, there is no deadline for the evaluation of the patch, and sometimes he will be notified that the patch submitted a few years ago is now merged. Some Debian maintainers refused to cooperate for personal preference, and the personal freedom given by the maintainers was too high to have a serious impact on Debian. The Debian bug tracker debbugs is from 1994 and is only used by Debian and GNU projects.
Stapelberg complained about Debian’s poor development process and was very dissatisfied with it, and said that the frustration of the Debian development process eventually exceeded its tolerance threshold. To this end, he wrote this article and hopes that his article will motivate Debian to make changes, which in turn will improve the developer’s experience of participating in maintenance.
