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Re: New-maintainer - STOP THAT SHIT



On Sun, Jan 14, 2001 at 11:47:21PM +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On 20010114T010257-0600, Scott Dier wrote:
> > > What about odd programs with breakage on non-x86 platforms?
> > Those are special cases, and warrant access to our non-x86 machines.
> What about those with sid (me) who want access to potato and woody machines
> to test with weird breakages? (me)

What about people who catch busses, who want access to a Ferrari and a
BMW and a Porsche and an Oldsmobile? You can't always get what you want.

Actually, in this case you can: potato and woody are publically available
on the archive, all you need to do is get a couple of spare computers and
install them both with potato and update one to woody. Voila! If you don't
have two computers, you can go to a little effort and setup a chroot.

> Why in hell are you people so immediately suspicious of NMs?

Who's suspicious? If you weren't too busy trying to take offence,
you'd notice that the only problem here is the people involved don't
have enough time.

Heck, if we're collectively suspicious of anyone it's the Account Managers
themselves.

Anyway. If you want to help the project, there are a million and one
things you can do, without an account, without your key in the keyring,
without fame and recognition, without anything. You can supply patches,
you can do testing, you can write programs, you can help out with users,
you can write documentation, you can do translations, you can join your
local LUG and help people with problems, you can make yourself available
to local corporations or non-profit groups to support new Linux installs
they might be interested in, you can setup YA third party apt site and
make debs of your stuff available that way for people who might want them,
you can write to or visit your local member of parliament and offer your
services educating him or her on this whole open source movement so that
the legislative process wrt intellectual property doesn't miss us out,
you can burn Debian CDs and donate some of the profits to the FSF or
SPI or someone else, you can run or help with installfests, you can
write magazine articles, you can write newspaper articles, you can call
up local radio stations and get them to do a show on that Linux thing,
and you can make lists of things other people can do.

The one thing that's *least* useful, though, is trying to tell
volunteers that, dammit, they're just not doing a good enough job,
and they'll have to work harder if they want any respect at all.

I mean, is it really difficult to see how approving someone who'll
maintain a couple of packages that'll get dropped into optional or extra
isn't really a high priority? Is it difficult to see how someone might
think, oh, I don't know, fixing bugs that might cause problems for the
existing 600 maintainers might be a more useful thing to spend time on
than approving a dozen more? Or alternatively how working for a living
might get in the way, or how real life might otherwise intervene over
the Christmas/New Year period?

Is it also difficult to see how maybe publically whining and bitching
about it when one DAM explicitly says to stop all the whining and
bitching mightn't really convince anyone that all the people waiting in
the new maintainer queue will actually be helpful productive members of
the project once approved?

*sigh*

I guess I have to assume it probably is that difficult.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

     ``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
                       -- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001

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