Re: mentors for new maintainers
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> Igor Grobman wrote:
> >
> > Fabrizio Polacco wrote:
> > > A place where a new-maintainer can feel supported, where instead I
> > > see that debian-devel badly accepts those recurrent threads.
> >
> > I like your idea, but I still think having individual mentor is
> > better.
>
> Yes it is, but ... who volunteers?
> I remember Bruce posting a request for this more then once and after
> several months nothing have moved.
I believe it was Fernando, and we'll never know who volunteered :-) (I know I
did).
>
> The problem IMO is that a lot of people can help on a list, where you
> can post and following a thread if you have time, but follow a new
> developer is a ... full time job.
I think you are exaggerating it a bit here. I have a little bit of an
experience of walking people through on IRC. It does not take that much of an
effort. First of all, I would expect them to read the docs, and refer to them
if I can. Some things are not clear in the docs, and need to be explained.
That's where a one-on-one mentor is a good idea. I really don't expect this
to be a full-time job. We do have enough docs to explain everything. A
mentor just needs to fill in the small holes which are not clearly explained
in the docs.
> And also I don't feel myself in the position of answering _all_
> questions that can come. I feel sure that I can aanswer some, but maybe
> what I say is not well fitted on that particular problem (every package
> is on its own side). So on a list I can be corrected by someone with
> more experience than me, and this is ok.
Well, you would not be forced to mentor a random maintainer, you can choose
someone who has a package that is similar to what you know. Again, if you
can't answer a question, you should not be shy to ask it on the lists. You
are the mentor after all ;-).
Here is where debian-newbiemaintainer list might be a good idea. Not only the
newbies can ask questions, but the mentors too :).
> For example I hadn't ever made a library package, and now I've packaged
> my liblockdev (I'm the upstream maintainer, so I had to :-). I still
> feel unsecure of having done right and I would like to post newbie
> questions on a friendly list ...
>
>
> > If you don't know the answer, you can always post to debian-devel :-).
>
> That's not that. I think that a problem has more that one right
> solution, and on a list you can have "the solution" while with a mentor
> you should stay only with that one.
I agree this is somewhat of a problem, but I still think the benefits of
mentors outweigh the disadvantages.
I still need more volunteers if we are going to go ahead with this idea.
--
Proudly running Debian Linux! Linux vs. Windows is a no-Win situation....
Igor Grobman igor@debian.org igor@digicron.com
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