On Sunday, 03 December 2000 at 16:09, Neal H Walfield wrote: > I am applying to become a Debian maintainer. At the moment, I am not > interested in packaging anything. Period. I do not have the time and > would rather exert myself elsewhere. Thus, should I not be made a Debian > maintainer? Will you recommend my rejection? Probably. Just like I'd recommend my own rejection, if I were an applicant. I find the idea of being a debian maintainer attractive too, but until I have a software package I want to maintain I'm not going to pursue it because... > There is a lot more about debian then making packages. There is > documentation, internationalization and debian internal projects such as > dpkg, apt, the installer, boot floppies and others. These take more than > a single person to code up and a list ends up as the maintainer of the > resulting packages. There is a lot more about being a maintainer than writing documentation, internationalization and the internal projects. Yes all these things take more than one person, but I have no idea why you think every single person who contributes anything at all to debian has to be a maintainer. You can do great work on all these things without being a maintainer. Do your thing and send your changes to the current maintainer of the relevant packages. The maintainer has a lot of responsibility for integrating all these contributions in a sane way, so that changes don't break systems, don't break upgrades, don't break removals, and work with the rest of the debian system. You can't do these things reliably without a good amount of knowledge about the package system, and some experience on top of that. > The thing that bothers me the _most_ is that all of the tasks that I > have listed take _way_ more effort than maintaining some package of > the packages in our archive: many are updated a few times a year, if > that. You want to work on debian, which is great. I see nothing in your mail which explains why you want to be a MAINTAINER. -- Don't make Godzilla mad!
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