Sponsorship, what it looks like as a new-maintainer.
I'm one of those on the "future maintainer" list of Mr. Hertzog's, and
have experience with his sponsorship idea that most lack. Here is that
experience:
While I consider myself as conscientious, my inexperience caused several
errors in my first package. They were too sophisticated for Lintian, and
too harmless to catch my attention. To Mr. Hertzog, someone who has
Debian experience, the errors were blatant. Within 24 hours of joining
Mr. Hertzog's sponsorship scheme, Mr Herztzog had sent a short list of
extremely helpful suggested improvements.
While the incoming directory may catch "rm -rf /" in postinst, it is not,
nor can it be, peer review. While Mr Schulze has expressed the need for
something beyond an account creating new-maintainer team, they face an
expanded role coinciding with an expanded workload. Even then, the expanded
role cannot encompass the peer review so beneficial of the sponsorship
scheme. Presently, Mr. Hertzog's sponsorship scheme is of substantal
benifit to new maintainers.
Assuming the new-maintainer team decides to leverage it, Mr. Hertzog's
program will also go a long way in elevating their overwhelming work
burden. Since one package will be guaranteed to be owned by the new
maintainer, the problem of new maintainers immediately disappearing can be
avoided. Since one package will be guaranteed to have been written by the
new maintainer, the minimum level of competence will be assured. Fully
realized, I feel the Mr. Hertzog's sponsorship scheme would be of
substantal benefit to Debian.
-Ben
"Don't see what is there and ask `why?', but image what does not exist and
ask `why not?'."
-Kennedy
On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> the sponsordhip idea interested some future debian developers. I already
> have some packages that are mostly ready to go into the Debian archive.
>
> But I wonder what I can put in the Maintainer field ... would it be a
> problem to leave the name of the real maintainer that is not yet a Debian
> developer ? I don't like it too much ... that's why I suggested to use
> Debian QA Group <debian-qa@lists.debian.org>. That does make sense for
> oprhaned packages that are adopted but does not make any sense for new
> packages ... any idea ?
>
> Another idea would be that we don't upload packages but simply ask new
> maintainer to process your application so that you can upload your package
> yourself but this doesn't depend on me ... Joey or James, what do you
> think about this ?
>
> BTW, if other people are interested, reply to this mail ...
>
> Here's the current list of sponsor/future developers :
> Sponsors
> ========
> Raphaël Hertzog <rhertzog@hrnet.fr>
> Josip Rodin <joy@cibalia.gkvk.hr>
> Stéphane Bortzmeyer <bortz@pasteur.fr>
> Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi>
>
> Future Maintainers
> ==================
> Justin N. Penney <spankenstein@mindless.com>
> Decklin Foster <decklin@home.com>
> Aldenor Falcao <aald@etfal.g12.br>
> Ben Hendrickson <bhendrickson@usa.net>
> Alexander Koch <efraim@argh.org>
>
> When you have a package ready, send a mail to all the sponsors with an URL
> where we can find your work, one of the sponsor will check it, will
> suggest you enhancement ... when the sponsor thinks that your package is
> ready, he will upload it for you.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Hertzog Raphaël >> 0C4CABF1 >> http://prope.insa-lyon.fr/~rhertzog/
>
Reply to: