On Mon, Dec 14, 1998 at 09:48:18AM -0500, Ben Collins wrote: > On Sun, Dec 13, 1998 at 10:12:23PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote: > > Look, if I feel like adding wonderful feature x to debhelper, that does not > > mean I feel like finding a bug in some package I don't use and fixing it. If > > you want people to contribute to debian, don't keep puttingh all this > > annoyance in our way of doing so. > Then don't help. [...] *boggle* My apologies. I've been trying not to throw my two cents in to the leadership wrangles -- I know others both have a better idea about what Debian needs in a leader, and how to tell if the various contendors have got it. Me, I know next to nothing. What I am pretty sure of though is the one phrase we *don't* need is ``Then don't help.'' As a volunteer organisation, we need help. As one which is growing more rapidly than we can probably cope with, we need help. As one which is constantly aflush with contributors bemoaning that they just don't have as much time to dedicate to Debian as they'd like, we need, quite frankly, all the help we can get. And while we certainly want to focus that help towards more critical areas, and while we sometimes have to say `no' to offers of assistance because we just can't make use of them yet, what we do *not* want to start doing is saying `no' just because what they want to do isn't the -devel flavour of the month. Cheers, aj [some notes: Every now and then, usually when I'm in a bad mood and don't feel like doing anything constructive, I look for bugs to fix. I've done a couple of NMU's now. What's surprised me most, after all the talk of "If you're going to make an NMU, mail the maintainer first and get permission, and post the diffs to the BTS, and make minimal changes, and are you sure you want to do this, be careful now, you could take someone's eye out with that..." and so on, is just how appreciative everyone is. Responses range from "Oh, yes, I've been busy, please do! Thanks!", to "Eeek, I hadn't seen that bug, thanks for reminding me", and even "Oh, that's fixed, hang on, I'll close it." Personally, I like being able to find something random to do, that no one else on the planet seems interested in, kill an hour, and get nice emails about it. But, personally, if I a simple ``hey, thanks!'' starts becoming, ``hey, thanks for adding that feature to foobar, but don't you think you really should have spent the hour on that nasty bug in bazquux instead?'' I'm not sure I really want to bother. Second, I realise that Ben had a "but seriously" following the above. Frankly, I don't much care. In my limited experience it's the little phrases that just slip out that you've got to watch out for, not the rants and raves, or the platforms and policies. ] -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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