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Problems were never solved (was: (calmer reply) Re: New-maintainer - STOP YOUR SHIT



On Sat, Jan 13, 2001 at 09:57:10PM -0600, Adam Heath wrote:
> What Ben is saying is that you can't compare apples to oranges.  Someone who
> maintains 60+ packages(Joey Hess), who maintains a large package(glibc(Ben
> Collins) or xfree86(Branden Robinson)), who works on low-level tools
> (dpkg(Wichert Akkerman, Ben Collins, me(lately)), apt(Jason Gunthorpe)),
> who works on system descisions(policy(Santiago Villa, Manoj Srivasta, Raul
> Miller)), can't be compared to someone who maintains a package like gtrue(this
> does not include a lot of behind the scenes work, aka ftpmaster, owner@bugs,
> debian systems administration(DSA)).

I must be a pretty dumb ass, with only xscavenger having my name in the
maintainer field. Anyway.

Adam, I will tell you something. This is not about senior and newbie, or
about elitism, or about rights to flame each other.

We have DAM's, two of them:

     ^[$B""^[(B Developer Accounts Managers -- <da-manager@debian.org>
             current  James Troup
             current  Martin (Joey) Schulze

Their job is to accept the new maintainers that have been processed by
other people, and install their account. If they can't (or want, as it also
seems) get the job done in a timely manner, they are overworked with this
job and should not hold on their position but pass it on to other people.
Those persons are the same who stopped the whole NM process for about a year.
We have a completely new Debian new maintainer system, but the same bottleneck
as before.

Everytime I asked Joey and James why they are not getting help from others,
I got the answer that there was NO ONE in the project beside those two who
wants to help and can be trusted with this position. I find this rather
ridiculous, and it shows how much trusts those two delegates have towards
the overwhelming majority of Debian developers. Note that both persons were
grand-fathered in, there was never a guideline how to decide if someone is
trustable.

Now, it could be true that there is indeed no-one who can be trusted and
wants to help. It is unlikely, but it could be true. But we can only find
out by letting people volunteer, and a rationale by James and Joey why this
volunteer can't be trusted. This decision making has to be made transparent.
If Joey and James are incapable of extending the DAM team, our project
leader has to appoint more DAMs. It's one of his responsibilities, and he
has failed in the past to do this (when the entire new maintainer procedure
was stalled). This is Wicherts major failure in my eyes.

This is the whole matter. We have not managed to solve our problem, despite
the huge efforts by Dale and his team. We have made one step forward and two
steps back.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de



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