Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian
Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@paniq.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 02:23, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> > smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers'
> > reference, web pages, etc, have you?
>
> I have. That is not what I call a smooth introduction. For a person who
> can devote, say 24 hours per month to working on a project like debian,
> it will take ages to read and understand those documents. This does not
> mean that the documents are useless. Also, there are many good ideas in
> those documents that could be taken further - for example the debian
> mentors, which could be extended from a simple mailing list to a more
> direct mentoring approach.
I just went through this process, and it actually seemed pretty smooth.
It took about 20 hours (rough guess) to read through the docs the first
time and assemble some feeble .deb's. Okay, maybe 30 hours. Then, I
found a mentor from the mailing list, and took about 10-20 more hours
turning those .deb's into something good.
This all seems right on par. That whole time seemed productive, and I
don't think I could have gone any faster and still learned to produce a
high-quality package.
Also, having a mentor was *extremely* helpful. Most of the things
pointed out during that second phase were very easy to learn, but I
wouldn't have noticed them myself. Having an expert's quick eyeball is
very good for learning the ropes!
-Lex
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