[Soc-coordination] GSOC idea for next year: undusting some packages

[Aigars Mahinovs]

About the original point, I would have to agree with Lucas - the SoC
is intended to develop new ideas and not for leadership or for routine
maintenance tasks.

2008/10/1 Michael Vogt <mvo at debian.org>:
> I agree here and I'm sorry that I have trouble devoting more time to
> apt. With a full time job (more than full time very often) and a life
> its not easy to manage.

I was convinced that someone is getting payed to work on apt and dpkg
full time, but that obviously was my dreamland. On a more constructive
note - what do people think about the possibility of drawing together
funding to get 1-2 full time developers and some project money (like
SoC, for attending conferences, ...) specifically for development of
apt (and possibly also dpkg). Volunteer effort is highly important,
however for more boring and more long-term tasks a stable worker paid
by companies that rely on apt and dpkg could provide a good support
for the broad community. It could take the current APT codebase and do
a fork as an upstream leaving the decision of whether to use it at all
on the Debian maintainers and hopefully reducing the workload of the
Debian APT maintainers by removing most of the development out of it.

There are two different questions here:
* Would that be a good idea from the Debian perspective?
* Would there be enough companies willing to give money to this?

-- 
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius at debian.org
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