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Bits from the New Maintainer Front Desk



Greetings,

As informing the public about the stuff one does seems to be "in" at
the moment, this mail was written to document changes in the New
Maintainer process:

1. Advocation policy
--------------------
We have effectively put applicants on hold (or even removed their
application) if they haven't contributed to Debian yet. This is now
an official policy and we will check for this directly after an
application is received from now on.
After an advocation message is received, a member of the NM Front
Desk will check what the applicant has done and, if needed, ask for
clarification. If there were no contributions to the Debian project
in a reasonable time frame (say, the last 3-6 months), the application
will be removed from the database. It is important that applicants
contribute to Debian before signing up for NM. This makes the NM
process much faster for everyone.
Someone will, as soon as possible, go through all submitted 
applications and mail those applicants that seem to be inactive.

2. Changes to nm.debian.org
---------------------------
UTF-8 support is now enabled on nm.debian.org. This should allow
everyone to use their real name, without the need of transcoding it 
to ASCII. (If you're from an Asian country, please use some kind of
romanized version, though.)  If you notice any problems (mangled
names, for example), mail new-maintainer@debian.org.

HTTPS connections were enabled, so that application managers can log
in over a secure connection.

The nm.d.o interface was changed to allow setting and viewing the account
name an applicant has requested. Only the respective application manager
is able to fill in this value at the moment, though it may be possible
that the application form will also get support for this in the future.
When submitting a value, the scripts check that the requested account
name is neither in use nor requested by another applicant.
If you are an Application Manager: Please put the account name of
your applicants in the database as soon as possible, thanks.

3. Documentation updates pending
--------------------------------
I'm currently working on a complete rewrite of the New Maintainer
documentation [1], which is a bit, ahem, outdated.
I still need people to proofread my new texts [2], so please send me
feedback if you had the time to look at them.

4. Technical changes
--------------------
nm.debian.org is now hosted on merkel.debian.org instead of
klecker.debian.org.

The DSAs added a "nm" user when moving the nm.d.o service to merkel.
Like the "qa" user, it owns all files in /org/nm.debian.org, controls
the cron jobs and is generally useful.

The sources for nm.d.o are now kept in a subversion repository [3]
and the old CVS repository is now deprecated.

During the last months, Martin Michlmayr, who has been charge of
the Front Desk for the last several years, has documented the
layout of /org/nm.debian.org as well as the tasks of the FD.  He
also appointed myself and Brian Nelson as members of the Front Desk.

Reflecting the distribution of work in the team, I'm taking the leadership
position and Brian acts as a backup.  Martin has decided to resign from
the Front Desk.  Thanks for the time and work you invested into the NM
process in the last years, Martin.

Thanks for your attention and all the fish,
Marc

Footnotes:
 [1] http://www.debian.org/devel/join/
 [2] http://people.debian.org/~he/
 [3] svn://svn.debian.org/nm/
 [4] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/nm/trunk/README?op=file&rev=0&sc=0

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