H. S. Teoh wrote: >>- New Maintainers want to be part of the Debian community, yet they >>usually start by searching the Internet for yet more trivial packages to >>include in Debian. These are packaged well and kept bug free, but this >>is a relatively simple task. Debian is full of buggy packages - New >>maintainers should prove that they are good enough by helping fix these. > Good idea. Some people have voiced their concern over NM's that only care > for their own little package. It's time to change the still-widespread > perception that becoming DD = becoming package maintainer. I think we need > some NM's who are just interested to fix bugs in existing packages, rather > than introduce new packages. IMHO, and I'm in a position where I'd like to join debian, this only works with properly maintained packages. For example, I've worked on some dput bugs recently. This was very satisfying because the maintainer (Christian Kurz) is very responsive and patient if patches or solutions aren't perfect. An example when it's very frustrating is bug number 151464. This was reported with a patch and a reference to zope mailing list discussions on June 30th, 2002 (this is before the woody relase) and hadn't been fixed until 9 Feb 2003. It would have been release critical (because it more or less breaks zope-loginmanager completely), if the breakage would not have been in a different package. In the meantime, I - as the bug's submitter - have gotten email from other debian users who sought help. I have asked for a NMU in August [1] on debian-python, but I got no relply at all. Frankly, with this handling of bug reports, I have no inclination to do this except when I have reasonable hope that my work is actually used for something. (Note that this happened to me while I was just another user, so I did not think about asking on mentors or anything.) I know that there are a lot of people working with prospective maintainers, however, a large part of the debian maintainers seem to think of them as people to ignore unless there's an opportunity of demonstrating which end of the food chain they are on. Cheers T. 1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2002/debian-python-200208/msg00032.html
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