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Re: [New maintainer] Working for Debian and becoming a registered Debian developer



> Your arguments make some sense, but we need to look at the situation
>practically as well as ideally. There are a few overworked people
>doing new maintainer processing.  There is not time to process all
>applicants in a resonable time.  

I agree with this statement completly.  But I disagree that manual
work is needed to add a developer.  I agree that debian has social
norms that require manual intervention.  I want to discuss those norms 
and see if they are still appropriate at this point in time.

>Some applicants say they want to work
>on something and then work on a different package altogether, some get
>their account and then disappear altogether.  The keyring already has
>many inactive (perhaps gone for good) maintainers.  As we approach
>release, we want to try to control this situation somewhat.  

I have already learned today that, apparently, there is no way to remove
inactive developers from the keyring.  I hope that someone proposes a
solution to this problem. But I maintain the the problem of removing old,
inactive members is different from the one of adding new, active members. 

>If someone does some attention-getting work before hand, it is going to
>catch the new-maintainer people's severely divided attention.  Fixing
>outstanding bugs, adopting an orphaned package. Getting things
>packaged ahead of time; these kinds of things will encourage a
>developer to say, "I'll spend my limited time supporting this person".
>Don't think of it as a requirement, but an opportunity to distinguish
>yourself (it's not a big deal at that, just distinguished from those
>who have done nothing) and speed your application.

If I choose to think in this way, fine.  But if I wish to work on 
what interests me, while contributing to debian, the current 
'debian social policy' is to reject my effort. 

Carl


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