<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...