Re: Planned changes to Debian Maintainer uploads

[Stuart Prescott <stuart@nanonanonano.net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


Just to put some hard numbers against this to illustrate the scope of the 
sponsoring operation through the debian-mentors mailing list, various team 
mailing lists and also between individuals, some data from UDD on the 
current packages in sid:

Total source packages:                    18790
Sponsored source packages including NMUs:  3141
Sponsored source packages excluding NMUs:  3036

So that's 16% of the source packages in the archive where the person who is 
signing off the changelog is not uploading their work but asking someone 
else to do it.

Looking at the people rather than the packages:

Total active DDs:       946
Total DMs in keyring:   178
Total sponsored people: 906

That is almost half the people who maintain packages in the archive do not 
have the ability to upload those packages themselves. As Arno pointed out, 
people being listed in Maintainer/Uploaders and not actually being able to 
upload their work directly to the archive is not unusual at all.

Those for whom the entire package sponsorship/mentoring etc is a complete 
mystery might like to:

  See devref §7.5
    http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/beyond-
pkging.html#newmaint

  See the list of packages looking for sponsors:
    http://mentors.debian.net/
    http://bugs.debian.org/sponsorship-requests
    http://mentors.pault.ag/

  Interact with some new maintainers and help them improve their packages 
and even help out by uploading things for them:
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/
    #debian-mentors on irc.debian.org / irc.oftc.net


cheers
Stuart


Notes: 

1. Sponsoring stats use the SQL from http://udd.debian.org/sponsorstats.cgi 
which includes a few "team uploads" in this because the "changed-by" address 
is not in the carnivore table (about 40 packages). Similarly some teams will 
be in the "sponsored people" list (about 3).

2. "DMs" and "sponsored people" are not disjoint sets as DMUA is per-
package.


- -- 
Stuart Prescott                 www.nanoNANOnano.net
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAk/Wj7gACgkQn+i4zXHF0aiicgCgsjiNdWOkwthC7ni+5etYG7Jg
9+QAnRBAkCA9/f3gllEmtz16g0evzrBy
=oBdp
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----