Re: another wake-up call (sad, but true)

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

I think that there are roughly three classes of NMs:

  * Those who apply for practical reasons (sponsorship sucks badly
    from time to time).

  * Those who want to shape Debian policies and procedures, and can't
    do so without being a DD (perhaps because non-DDs are sometimes
    looked down upon).

  * Those who think that DD status is an acknowledgment of their work
    for Debian (which is not a problem per se, motivating people is
    important!).

Of course, there is always some overlap between these catagories.

Things go bad (beyond the usual inconvenience of a delay) when the new
maintainer and the other NM process participants have disagreeing
views on the reason behind the application.  For example, an AM might
assume that an applicant is mostly in the first category (maybe
because he does not give the application a very high priority), while
the applicant thinks that the process is just a small, unimportant
step before she is awarded Debian membership for his previous
contributions to Debian.  Now, someone who needs DD status as a
practical matter will not take delays personal, so the AM rightly
assumes that the applicant will come back and asks when there are
delays which cause problems.  On the other hand, if the applicant
views DD status as some kind of award, he might find it insulting if
things apparently don't progress at all without his gentle prodding,
especially when the various queues aren't processed in a strict FIFO
manner.

I don't want to downplay the NM process problems, and I don't want to
claim that the conflict I described is the reason why the applicant is
fed up in this case.  Obviously, if the NM process wears down
applicants (instead of preparing them for membership), things go
horribly wrong.  But in this case, it seems as if the failure could
have been avoided if the applicant sent a single message, asking about
the status of his application.  The delays are a real problem, but so
is lack of communication (and, to be honest, I think the "status
change", if there was any, was on the side of the applicant, so he
should have contact his AM, not the other way round).

(For the sake of search engines, I tried to write things down in an
anonymous manner, since I believe that the problems are general and
not specific to the present case.)