Re: Four days
Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com> writes:
> A lot. The current process is individualized mentorship, not team
> mentorship.
How so? Anyone can provide input on a question asked here, and
frequently a question will get a team of mentors descending to mentor
the querent.
You might be talking, not about mentors, but about *sponsorship*. Yes,
of course there needs to be some individual sponsoring a particular
release for upload into Debian.
But sponsoring is done per release per package. That's not the
mentorship process, which happens in the open, in a team environment,
here in discussions in this forum.
> One is to use the mentors mailing list as the maintainer for mentee
> packages.
With this wording it's becoming clear that you don't mean “mentor”, but
rather mean “sponsor”. I'll proceed on that basis.
> That way the burden of quickly orphaned packages is dispersed over the
> whole set of mentors rather than just one.
I think it's a mistake to make a mailing list take on the role of
sponsor; not everyone on this list is in a position to sponsor packages
(I am not), and you get the problem that responsibility for sponsorship
would be diluted.
Teams should form around areas of interest and expertise in a particular
kind of package. I don't think there's a useful expertise of “packages
maintained by people who aren't yet Debian members”, so it's not
sensible to make such a team.
So I don't think a “team sponsor” would be a good idea. Rather, if
packages deserve team maintenance or not, that's orthogonal to whether
the package needs its releases sponsored into Debian.
> The other idea is to reduce DD involvement in the mentoring process
> itself by making mentees more responsible for themselves. Take a set
> of mentees, have them work together to get their packages in shape,
> then maybe once a month (or every couple weeks) have them show the set
> of packages that they have ready to the mentors list. That would also
> reduce RFS traffic on this list. This list would become more of a
> coordination point for joining mentee teams.
That doesn't need a separate forum though; people already come here to
‘debian-mentors’ as a forum to ask advice about packaging, and they do
in fact get that advice, from Debian members and non-members alike.
I agree that advice should be sought much more commonly before the RFS
is sent; I think this forum is already good for that purpose. How do you
propose encouraging that behaviour, though?
--
\ “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, |
`\ neat, and wrong.” —Henry L. Mencken |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
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