Re: New-maintainer - STOP THAT SHIT
On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 12:31:24AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Well, having someone say "I'm going to setup and maintain an arm
> autobuilder, have a look at http://foo.bar.org/~buildd/ where I've
> already got it half working" versus someone saying "I don't really feel
> comfortable doing more than one or two packages yet" seems a good start.
> (cf, the Tasks and Skills check).
This is not how most of us started, including you and me. And now we
are two very active members. It's that double standard, which is a new
idea, that worries me. But that's only remotely an issue of this
discussion. The new maintainer procedure we have in place makes sure
new developers have the skills they absolutely require, and they can pick up
more as they grow into the community.
> And I mean, it'd be nice to not need to prioritise people, but we still
> don't seem to be able to handle the volume of new maintainer applicants
> we have effectively, so we need to do *something*.
Uh, as far as I can see, the new maintainer team as a whole is doing fine,
it's just the DAM bottleneck at issue here.
> And while it'd be nice to have a dozen clueful, well known and highly
> trusted people who can spend twelve hours a day every day just processing
> new-maintainers, we just plain don't have a dozen clueful, well known
> and highly trusted people who're willing to do that. We basically have
> one such individual, and he's neither willing nor able to spend that
> much time on n-m's (or so I'd presume).
I don't think we have actually determined how many clueful, well known
and highly trusted people we have. Nor is it really determined if all
those characteristics are absolutely an requirement ("well known" for
example is quite vague, it is certainly not necessary that I know him
well. I don't know James well either).
And we don't need a lot of people with a lot of time. We need some people
with a bit of time. And not one people with no time to spend on this (not
even to speak of what this person seems to think about new maintainers).
There has never been made an acceptable public offer for this job,
so don't make any assumptions about the amount of people that might
be willing to do it and meet the requirements.
> Anyway, in summary: expecting James or Joey to do whatever's required
> to make you, personally, happy, no matter how difficult or time
> consuming or against what they personally think is proper is completely
> unreasonable, and not remotely appropriate for a project populated by
> volunteers. Wishing and asserting that there should be more DAMs, or
> that DAMs should have or make more time is a pointless waste of time,
> your own especially.
You lack a clue: James and Joey are volunteers, they volunteered for the
job. They picked up the responsibility. If they fail to perform what is
necessary to get the job done properly, they should step aside and make room
for other people. Your assertion that nobody in this project can be bothered
to help out in this area is without reason: The new maintainer project
as founded by Dale is running fine, and there are many people working there.
Now, the only issue is if there are enough trustable persons to do it.
That's a decision that has to be made by the project itself, usually this
would be done by the project leader or his delegates. If they fail to
appoint new members to keep everything running nicely, we have to read
the constitution to see what the project can do about it.
Marcus
Reply to: