On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 09:12:34AM +0100, Joerg Wendland wrote: > I think this is the problem we have with sponsorship. We limit judgement > over prospective developers to their package they want to have sponsored. > If such a developer has a package that nobody wants, he is not considered. An NM should be able to quickly figure out that if he has a package that nobody wants, he will /not/ find a sponsor. An NM who packages software nobody wants is not contributing anything useful to Debian, so why should anyone be surprised that no one wants to help? The current NM process requires the prospective developer to show that he /does/ have something useful to contribute. Sponsorship is not the same thing as advocacy. Sponsorship is checking over a package and uploading it to the archive. Advocacy is vouching for a prospective developer's fitness to be a developer. Advocacy is required, sponsorship is not. And although getting a sponsor is a good way to find an advocate, it is not the only way. In other words: if you see someone without a sponsor who has packaged something that you think is useful, but that you don't feel qualified to sponsor, talk to the NM! Even if you aren't comfortable uploading the package, you should be able to help with packaging issues (most first-time packages are rough around the edges -- I know mine were). You might encourage the NM to look for another package to adopt as well, one that you would be able to sponsor. You can get to know the NM, and decide if you can advocate this person; and once they are approved, they can upload their packages without needing a sponsor. > The prospective developer himself reads about the NM process, finds a > sentence like 'you should have some package being sponsored' and so builds > some package that nobody wants. The Right Way[tm] IMHO to deal with such > situations would be to tell the developer that noone wants his packages > and that he should have a look at some orphaned package to take over. > I would change 'he is looking for a sponsor' into 'he is looking > for an advocate'. An advocate could check his skills by means of checking > his packages and then tell him that noone actually wants that package in > Debian and he has bring something else like an orphaned package. Precisely. Building packages from scratch is a useful exercise, so that all developers know how it's done; but there are plenty of existing packages that need help. If what you say above isn't how things are already happening, then it would certainly benefit us to clarify this. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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