New-Maintainer - Some Facts

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

There are at least three threads going on at the moment about broken
New-Maintainer, mostly focused on the long waiting times for DAM approval.
I'd like to provide some facts that, I hope, will make clear that the DAM
is _not_ the bottleneck being portayed by some impatient applicants.

First of all there are a total of:

  543 applicants registered in the nm database

Of these:

  193 have completed the process and are currently Debian Developers.
      (maximum process time for this group is 546 days) (141 avg.)

   99 applicants have been put on hold by their AM.

   52 applicants are waiting on DAM approval
      (maximum process time for this group is 190 days) (29 avg.)

  152 are currently working through the application process
      (maximum process time for this group is 365 days) (43 avg.)

    8 applicants are waiting for their AM to confirm
      (maximum process time for this group is 100 days) (2 avg.)

   40 applicants are waiting for AM assignment
      (maximum process time for this group is 307 days) (34 avg.)

First, note that this list has one more member than the total database.
I'm not sure why...

The only part of the process that is faster than DAM approval is the
"waiting for AM to confirm" step, which is normaly trivial and for some
AMs is automated.

In every other case, whether you use maximum, or average waiting times, 
DAM approval is markedly faster than any other step. In comparison to the
total time of application using maximum waiting times, the DAM step is
less than half of the total time. When comparing averages it is less than
1/5th of the total time.

Given that we started this process after the process had been stalled for
almost a year, much of the reported delays result from the load of this
large backlog, not flaws in the system.

Last week there were over 70 applicants waiting for the DAM, and had been
waiting since before Christmas. Since I am still trying to get
re-organized after the recent holidays, I'm impressed that the DAM has
been able to process over 20 applicants in the last few weeks.

Everyone here is a volunteer and we should all be thankful for the efforts
of the AMs and the DAM for their fine work in bringing more maintainers
into the organization.

For those of you who are impatient with the slowness of the NM process, I
can only suggest that this is only the beginning of your frustrations.
Debian is a completely volunteer organization where everyone works at
their own pace. Some are spectacularly productive, but most of us plod
along wishing for more time to spend on our packages, regretting that our
time is often taken up explaining these "rules" to others. This often
means that things don't move fast enough for everyone. Such is life.

Luck,

Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_-   Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide"  _-_-_-_-_-_-

aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (850) 656-9769
      Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road
      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

_-_-_-_-_-_- See www.linuxpress.com for more details  _-_-_-_-_-_-_-