Re: user contributed
aj@dungeon.inka.de (Andreas Jellinghaus) writes:
> a) some people want to contribute software.
> b) they could do this as debian maintainer.
>
> from my view, the problem is, that people want to do a), but don't know
> how much work b) will be, and so they don't do anything. the solution is
> not a "user contributed" area, we should invite people to become a
> debian maintainer.
>
I actually have some packages to contribute already since a few months
and i definitely could do this as a maintainer if i wanted to. But
currently the situation of becoming one differs slightly from the
situation present when there was the development cycle going from
Debian-1.2.x to Debian-1.3.x. Becoming a maintainer now means to have
to upgrade at a certain point to 'unstable' and libc6 which is a step
i'd like to avoid as long as possible. It's almost more like the
switch from a.out to ELF quite some time ago.
I'd like to be a maintainer with 'stable' as my reference system. I'd
like to contribute to a system which is reliably working here and now
and not in some unforseeable future. I'd like to contribute what i
personally need to get working on my stable system anyway. I'm
primarily a user and i want to contribute for other user's delight and
not to a development effort which still is not recommendable for day
to day work. I think i'm not alone with this perspective. Maybe we
should name the famed "user-contrib" something like "stable-addons".
> i know some people here using debian, and one of them said :
> "i thought about packaging some programs, but to do it i have to become
> a debian maintainer, and maintain the program, and that might be too
> much work."
>
I don't think so. For me this is the fun part. ;-)
> these people don't know what they can expect if they choose to do
> something. uploading a user contributed package is easy : upload and
> forget. no additional work.
>
The packages i'd like to upload to a user-contrib section have taken
me considerable time to be created actually, they have undergone
numerous compilation cycles and are quite regularily updated. I do
care about them and i'm pretty much too proud of them to simply drop
them in and forget about them. Check out my non-maintainer package of
the current Midnight Commander available from our FTP site at
"ftp://ietpd1.sowi.uni-mainz.de/pub/debian/unofficial/";. Whenever a
new version comes out it seldomly takes me more than a single day to
provide a new Debian package. The current official maintainer is
doing his releases at a far slower rate. Actually the current version
of MC available in 'stable' is an upstream devel version 3.5.17
packaged Mon, 24 Feb 1997 12:56:43 +0100. In the meantime there have
been *two* major upstream releases and this is not reflected by the
Debian version of this package.
> i would like to do some "partnership" or so : people should test for a
> while how it is to be a debian maintainer, and if they don't like it,
> they can stop it. no risk, no commitment.
>
Everybody always can start being a maintainer a simply drop out if the
person doesn't like it. Considering some discussions on debian-devel
this seems to have happened more than once.
> but the user contributed section has also an advantage : we can get
> contacts to people who are too "shy" to become a debian maintainer.
>
And Debian can get additional (though unofficial) packages as a
compliment for an official stable distribution and eventually lateron
for 'unstable' too. Personally i'm not very interested in hand
holding (critique by users is always welcome) but in contributing and
getting out additional stuff for 'stable'.
Thanks for your input, P. *8^)
--
Paul Seelig pseelig@goofy.zdv.uni-mainz.de
African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
Johannes Gutenberg-University - Forum 6 - 55099 Mainz/Germany
My Homepage in the WWW at the URL http://www.uni-mainz.de/~pseelig
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