Hi all, > Hey everyone, > > Niels Thykier and I were talking on #debian-mentors. I was saying > that I find the debian-mentors list kind of lonely and impersonal -- > it's mostly RFSs, and so many emails don't even get an answer. > > How depressing! > While I can understand your feelings, I still have several questions and somewhat contradictory remarks. Obviously I can only speak for myself. - Briefly looking at http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2010/09/ it seems that the number of emails not being responded to by anyone is not that high. Furthermore it seems there's a lot more to this list than just RFS. And I found only a single non-RFS email that wasn't responded to. - As a mentor, as far as RFS are concerned, I can only work on packages where I have some proper background. That is, I should be using those packages or work on related packages. - As a mentor, I cannot look at each and every RFS, I'll have to be able to spot interesting packages quickly. I therefore ignore all RFS with package names where I cannot deduce that they could be relevant for me. Hint: it might be useful to add the short description of the main binary package to the subject (I have no idea what, e.g., "vavoom" is about). - Although debian-mentors is a default destination for RFS, it would probably better to contact one of the teams that works on related packages. Again, the vavoom package (I now looked at the RFS): Why wasn't pkg-games-devel@lists.a.d.o contacted? > So I was thinking it would be nice if every email thread got a > public reply within four days. That's a goal that Niels and I have > set, and we hope maybe some of you help too. Even if we reply, "Eek, > I'm swamped. Try again later," I figure that is nicer than hearing > nothing back. > Would you mind to elaborate on the expected benefit of such a step? *Whom* would you expect to be doing such replies? Is that more than an "ACK, your message made it to the list" (you can check that by looking at the list archives as well)? I think you are only curing some symptoms, but fail to tackle the underlying root cause (some of which might be the points I mentioned above). > In general, I encourage mentees and mentors to consider 4 days the > timeout on your debian-mentors conversations. So if you email your > usual sponsor and don't hear an answer within 4 days, try once more. I'm not sure how mentees usually handle the situation where a package has already been sponsored once. I'd expect mentors to be ready to handle further uploads, and IMHO such RFS shouldn't even pop up on the list. After a few rounds, people should be both ready and willing to apply for Debian-Maintainer status. > After another four days, email the list asking for a sponsor > (explaining that you have a normal sponsor). > Should the mentor indeed be non-responsive, this should be *clearly* indicated in the subject of an RFS email to debian-mentors. > I'm hoping to take some of the uncertainty out of the process. What > do you guys think? > > And what other cultural improvements can we make to debian-mentors? > What else can we do to make this place supportive and helpful for > the progress of y'all mentees into sparkly Debian contributors and > developers? > IMHO one of the most important steps would be for mentees to look for appropriate teams already working on similar packages. It would actually be beneficial if people first subscribed to their respective lists to see what's going on there and then try to get in touch with them about a new package. Hope this helps (mentees and mentors alike), Michael
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