On 00-12-03 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?
Any recommendation would do nothing. The only one who could really make
this recommendation is your AM or the DAM. If you are not interest in
packaging anything, when then do you want to apply for new maintainer?
(I'm just curious to know).
> 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.
Right, but most of this stuff is already done by people that maintain
packages in debian for quite some time now. These tasks are seldom done
by new maintainer. (This should not mean, that they aren't welcome to
help with this tasks, but that's quite seldom to see a new maintainer
help in such a task).
> How about the maintenance of the servers, is that not a worthy job? Or
> perhaps PR? The webpage?
For helping to improve the webpage, there's as far as I know, no need to
have a debian.org-Account. For PR it would be good to have one, but I
don't know if the PR-Team currently needs help or not. And the server
maintaince is done by the debian admin team, which consists of mostly
long-time developers and not new maintainers.
> And finally, how about the ports? Are the Debian/BSD port or the
> Debian/Hurd port not in need of Debian people?
I don't know, but still helping in a port doesn't mean you need a
debian.org-account. It's quite helpful for some tasks to have such
account, but no really needed.
I don't want to reject anyone or show that we don't need new
maintainers. But I want to show you that there are quite some tasks that
everyone can do, without being a debian maintainer and that some of the
tasks are done by long-time developer.
> 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.
Well, but you forget to see the for a part of these tasks you need to be
technical skilled and if someone is technical skilled he should have no
problem with creating debian packages.
Ciao
Christian
--
Debian Developer and Quality Assurance Team Member
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