On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 06:14:17PM +0100, Bernhard R. Link wrote:
> * Sune Vuorela <nospam@vuorela.dk> [070226 14:28]:
> But Pierre argued that handling bugs is "tedious" work and there
> is no time for all of them and still packaging new upstreams.
I meant that you have to choose a balance between seeing all the bug
closed and packaging new versions further. For that you usually only
follow closely >= important bugs in large pacakges, because you don't
have enough time to do anything else. Give me teams twice as large as
the current ones, and we may be able to do both.
Also consider that if you suck all the packaging fun, then the
maintainer is burnt out. That is part of the reason why I stopped
working on KDE packages: I just don't see any fun anymore in packaging
KDE. And to avoid burnout, yes you need manpower. If manpower is not
here, then you need to find some kind of balance.
If I've let people think I think it's bad to deal with bugs then I've
been very very unclear... I just say it's unrealistic to ask maintainers
of the largest packages in debian to answer to every bug given the
manpower in those teams (and I can't see a single exception, hope I'm
mistaken).
The real problems here are those IMHO:
* newcomers usually are afraid to help maintaining "big" and "popular"
packages. They just don't dare to do that, they are afraid to break
everything.
* newcomers need to learn a lot of things before being able to package
those large packages, and the old farts of the team are so
overloaded with work, that they do not necessarily have enough time
or will to "teach" them.
As a result newcomers tend to package new things rather than helping
the big teams. Most of our new members (at least for the KDE team) are
already quite experienced in packaging when they come to us.
And honestly, I don't like the idea of pushing NM's to do bug
triaging. That really looks like some kind of refined slavery or
torture. NM is boring and tedious enough not to disgust applicants more
than the whole process already do. If you want to bring more manpower,
make packaging sexy. Bug triaging is not sexy. Not at all. This is a
vital part of packaging. But please, do not push the shitload on the
wanabe-DD because the DD in the teams can't keep up. They're not here
for making the coffee and photocopies, but really to do the same work as
the full DD's.
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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