Re: Four days

[Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:35:04 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > As someone who has attempted to go through the mentoring process, I
> > agree very much that it is rather depressing.
> 
> How much of that is actually a problem, though? How much is an integral
> part of gaining humility as to the state of the packaging work, and the
> pain of learning new conventions and processes?

The depressing part is that almost no one is interested in being a
mentor, so its almost impossible to get your work into Debian, which
makes the effort seem pointless. Note that I've actually succeeded many
times, but I've also failed many times as well.  And the failures are
all due to lack of an interested mentor, not due to package quality (a
bunch of my packages are on mentors.debian.net and lintian clean).

I think that the efficiency of mentoring is the problem that needs to
be solved.  That could possibly be improved by treating mentoring tasks
as bugs.  It may also possibly be improved by treating mentoring as a
team task.  I see the complaint that DDs choose not to mentor because
they end up stuck with unmaintained packages.  Well, it would be less
of a burden if those were team maintained (make new mentees part of
those teams as well).  Maybe mentorship should be a team effort?  Start
a new group of mentees every month that work together perhaps?

Best wishes,
Mike