Re: [DRAFT for REVIEW] The Debian Project improves its NewMaintainer process
On 22/04/08 at 20:23 -0300, Andre Felipe Machado wrote:
> Hello,
> Thanks for your comments.
> The "about Debian Project section" is intended for newcomers and for PR.
> At the end of each PR, it is likely to be ignored from second reading by
> the same one.
> By then, it accomplished its mission.
Most of the links are also useless, or misleading. For example, you link
to http://www.debian.org/ports/beowulf/. Isn't that dead?
> The attached draft contains corrections for (1) and (2).
Please posts drafts inline, as text. Doing it now.
| 25 new Debian Developers this week: The Debian Project improves its New
| Maintainer process
25 is wrong. 19.
| At april 18th 2008, 25 new Debian Developers (DD) accounts were created.
|
| Debian Project is a volunteer effort, and needs more skilled manpower at
| almost every human knowledge area.
"almost every human knowledge area" is too much.
| One of the bottlenecks is the Debian Accout Management (DAM), and while
| the batch of new DD accounts were created, Sam Hocevar, at a Debian
| Project Leader (DPL) announcement just before transferring position to
| Steve McIntyre, the new elected DPL, delegated some important tasks to
| more people, distributing future workload.
this part is better (more true). Making 2-3 sentences out of it instead
of 1 would be better.
| The Debian Project needs more developers,
you already said that 2 paragraphs ago.
| and this decision is a measure
| to quickly improve its New Maintainer process.
|
| The Applicants' progress can be tracked at every phase.
and your point is?
| Last year, the Debian Maintainer status was approved as another decision
| to improve process, granting partial rights of a full DD.
|
| Ongoing discussions are being held at debian-project mailing list to
| find a better New Maintainer process management with a more scalable and
| permanent solution.
|
| Debian Project has a long history of debating its own key solutions, and
| the emerging ones, having the colective wisdom of many, had been proven
| under real conditions.
I'm not sure "had" is correct, on the english level.
I don't really like this style of "1 sentence per paragraph" text. But
maybe it's common in PR.
> How the Debian Website Redesign Project [3] is going? Read the comments
> at [4] for some examples. At face to face meetings, the thing is even
> worse...
[4] is a French worse-than-slashdot website. And the comments are quite
OK on this story. You can't take every single negative comment on such
sites and do a press release for each of them.
> Others think Debian is a bunch of elitist geeks, with some
> "kings-of-the-montain" entrenched slow pacing the whole project.
Isn't that partially true? :-)
> I expect to reach at least enough repercussion to reduce [0] effects and
> attract some interested people.
I agree that my blog gave a negative image of Debian to people who don't
know Debian yet. On the other hand, I know people who would be good
contributors, but don't get into NM because the process takes ages. If I
were one of those, I would prefer the "We know there's a big problem,
and say so publicly" approach to the "Let's hide that, after all it's
not important" approach. But maybe that's just me.
Also, please don't believe that DDs disapproved my blog. I got my share
of negative comments, but the positive ones clearly outnumbered them.
(and most of the negative comments were about the title, which - I
agree - could have been more moderate)
I still don't think that you should publish this press release. Instead,
I think that we should improve NM, get someone processed in less that 1
or 2 months, and then do a press release about "XXX became a DD in less
than n months". That would be a lot more positive than PR about
technical details. But for this to happen, we need:
- more AMs, so we can process the small backlog of candidates we have
currently
- a very good candidate with some free time, so he can answer all the
questions in a few days
- an AM as responsive as the candidate
- DAMs that will process people quickly
Since I was curious about our current status, here is when the new DD
sent their initial application:
2004-02-25 toddy
2005-07-24 miriam
2005-10-09 danchev
2005-11-16 tincho
2006-04-11 camrdale
2006-04-11 keving
2006-07-05 plessy
2006-07-11 ag
2006-08-25 bencer
2006-09-01 goneri
2006-09-13 kibi
2006-10-08 stew
2007-01-09 filipe
2007-03-26 holmgren
2007-04-03 gregoa
2007-05-03 smcv
2007-06-25 bernat
2007-08-18 kmap
2007-12-30 meike
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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