Re: New-Maintainer - Some Facts
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On Tue, Jan 16, 2001, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Regardless of the specific time delays, it is of concern to me that we have
> only one DAM (it doesn't matter who he is or how much time he has). Even if
> this DAM had all the time of the world and would do nothing but to process
> applicants, it is important that we have a reserve in case James becomes
> suddenly unavailable. It is important that we have somebody who knows how to
> continue the work then, and why not have this person help out before that
> critical moment, too?
Well, it was pointed out quite a lot of time that the DAM is one of the
most critical - or let's say most worthful and most to be trusted -
position in the project. In fact, it's the person that is responsible
for all of the developers, in some way or the other. At least he hands
the accounts on the debian machine parc to mostly totally strangers. I
would get more than paranoid if I'd had to do such a job - and I bet
James is. It's part of the job, you see.... And now try to find a
person that you'd trust enough to give the same "power" to.
It's not like you can mail to -private and say "Hey, someone likes to
become DAM?" Don't start whining about the DAM, it's just that he might
read you and get distracted by your mail from the approval job or
something else....
> More than one DAM also distributes the individual waiting times more
> unifromly among the waiting time interval (because supposedly all DAMs work
> independently of each other), so it will be a more smooth operation. We
I wouldn't like a DAM that works independently from the others. I
would say, yes, there can be more DAM, but more than everywhere else
they should still make the decisions together than each one for himself.
> don't have enought numbers to know this for sure, but I think part of the
> problem might be that the DAM is processing people in bunches, so some wait
> long and some not at all, resulting in a good average time. But as I said,
> this can not be concluded from these numbers.
Compare the average to the median. Average can easily be distracted by
a single high (or low) number. The median should satisfy you more.
It's on the front page of <http://nm.debian.org/>, there's no magic
behind this statistics.
> In fact, I find it hard to derive any useful information from the
> numbers you posted[1]. Just as an example, they don't include the
> amount of work required for each step. Working through the application
> process is time intensive (as it depends on the communication between
> two people), while creating an account is probably time intensive
> sometimes and often not (James said this depends partly on the review
> created by the AM). This suggests that the 29 avg time for DAM
> approval weights more than the 43 avg application process time.
In fact you should also here compare the median, which is 27 to 8
currently. It is true that you can't really compare that because you
don't know how much work it is. The application process isn't always
time intensive, there are not quite less applicants that are well
prepared and keep the infos at hand, maybe have already the one or the
other package in the system through sponsors... Or that the AM and the
NM can meet personally, on irc or so and speed up the communication
also. That's not that unusual, I did the processing part with my AM
mostly on IRC.
Just my 0.02 EUR.
Alfie
--
You've been leading a dog's life. Stay off the furniture.
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