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skills of developers



Hello.

I would like to move one subject. What are the required skills of the
developers/developers-to-be?

Debian Policy, Developers' Reference, New Maintainers' Guide and most 
documentation describe only _how to make a good package_. 

Good package in that case means it will comply with Debian Policy.
That's great, but that doesn't ensure us that maintainer know anything
besides mentioned documents. That's not big deal to create Debian package.

That's example:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2005/07/msg00254.html
Nothing against poster of this document... that's only example which is the
most up-to-date one.

Please read whole thread to get know about rationale.

Don't lie ourselves. Everyone who know where to put binary and architecture
independent data and  a little of bashism can became Debian developer.
In general there's nothing wrong with that, but... yes there's BIG BUT here, 
should everyone be able to maintain every package on the world?

Or should we split duties and call persons repectively to their knowlegde?

To be honest I intended to join Debian project mainly to work on
documentation/translation efforts. I was HIGHLY SURPRISED that my
application manager (greetings to him) asked me how to create Debian
package. For Christ's sake who the f*** I am to know about it if I'm going
only to translate some stupid documents huh?

Yep, I learned that and I passed "the exam". Sure I know
C/Python/Perl/<put whatever you want what I could learn in two evenings to
be able to pass exam> but I hate that. Yes not everone in the Unix/Linux 
world loves to hack.

I'll be never good programmer and I'm aware of it. Knowing C and knowing
C can be two different things. 

In sum. Maybe it's time to create additional positions in Debian project?
Maybe something like Packager (with knowledge about Bash and Debian
Policy), Translator (with knowledge about some particular language and
English), Helper (with knowledge about Debian in general), and finally
DEVELOPER which develops software and is able to fix it if it's broken.
Developers could be splitted to Python/Perl/C/C++/Java/Mono/and so on...

I suppose we're going to have flamewar here as usual, so please... oh
nevermind :P

regards
fEnIo

-- 
  ,''`.  Bartosz Fenski | mailto:fenio@debian.org | pgp:0x13fefc40 | irc:fEnIo
 : :' :       32-050 Skawina - Glowackiego 3/15 - w. malopolskie - Poland
 `. `'           phone:+48602383548 | proud Debian maintainer and user
   `-          http://skawina.eu.org | jid:fenio@jabber.org | rlu:172001

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