<rant>
One of my biggest complaints about the Debian project is
that we lack good project management people. Of course, it
is to be expected that with 400-odd developers and many
to-be-developers, coordination and communication are key.
Sadly, no one seems to put a lot of emphasis on this. Our
slow release cycle is (IMHO only, of course) a direct
consequence of poor communications and coordination. Sure
there is tons of work involved, but it can be done much
better and more coherently if we had a plan in place rather
than everyone going about doing their own thing. Many of the
flamewars that erupt regularly on the lists also stem from
people not communicating well and arguing before thinking.
I'm sure this is nothing new, and many of these assertions
have been made before, again and again. Sometimes I wish
some of the Debian folks would just take a more draconian
approach to the issues that are brought up and deal with
them quickly and decisively.
</rant>
Later, when I'm more calm....
Since I didn't feel like doing any work, I decided to go
package something :P xerces (XML library from Apache) looks
pretty interesting. XML seems to be in the news so much
lately, I wonder if it's all hype.... been looking at SOAP a
bit. The idea is good, I think, but there seems to be fairly
severe performance tradeoffs. Hrm...