Re: developer status again
On Friday 30 October 1998, at 14 h 4, the keyboard of Martin Schulze
<joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE> wrote:
> d) If you want to speed up things, why don't you work on things that
> are really urgently needed?
...
> Work on this and present us with solutions and then come back and
> nag the people who are trying to resolve these issues instead of
> processing a new maintainer who would - in the worst case - only
> introduce new bugs.
If I understand you, you suggest that just adding new packages is more trouble
than benefit? Like (I'm sure) most of the Debian "developers" (I prefer to
call myself a packager) it's the only thing I do. Because, if I screw things
up, I will only break my packages. Give the root password on master to me,
with the responsability... say to manage a real freeze, and Debian will be
history.
It's probably the same for many people: there are a lot of guys (and gals, is
there one in Debian?) which can take care of their own packages: it's quite
simple, your failures will be limited in effect, and you can learn and, may
be, one day, you will have learn enough to work in the core of Debian. I just
begin to understand what tremendous work and responsability it is. I'm sure
that an offer such as yours should be limited to people with >= 1.5 years of
active Debian work.
In the mean time, people who want to join and learn should be, IMHO, accepted,
as long as they understand that there are ordinary packagers, packagers of
very important packages, where errors break many others (the mess in X11
fonts) and core developers (I still understand nothing about the way dpkg
works). IMHO, people who work on the core are better helped when we leave them
alone than when a newbie "tries to help" (the worst thing when you have a
deadline).
> Please pick packages with long-standing open bugs and *FIX THEM*
> before just spreading junk.
Note that I do it, like several people, but, if the maintainer do not accept
them or is simply overworked and let them stall, I don't feel confident enough
to make a NMU (otherwise, I would patch netatalk a lot!).
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