On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 09:12, 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. I think a person which wrote: "I used to Webmaster for cnn.com, but I am bored and would like to webmaster all your webservers 24/7" would most likely find a sponsor. (That is just an example, the webservers work fine to my knowledge.) > If such a developer has a package that nobody wants, he is not considered. > 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. I quote from http://www.debian.org/devel/join/ : -------------------------------------------------- If you are interested in maintaining packages, then you should look at our Work-Needing and Prospective Packages list to see what packages need maintainers. Taking over someone else's package is the best way to start out as a developer as you can learn from what the previous maintainer has already done. There are several things, other than package maintenance, you can contribute to in Debian. Testing and reporting/fixing bugs is great help to us, along with helping in writing good documentation, or doing web maintenance, translation (i18n & l10n), publicity, legal support... our quality assurance web page lists several possible ways to help. -------------------------------------------------- > 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 am a new maintainer and had very good help from my sponsor. So I have looked over the list over people wanting sponsorship several, to look for packages that I think are simple enough for me to help with packageing or interesting enough for me to work with the aspirant in spe with to get to work. I find and the rest of the community can't find packages or prospects they want to sponsor that is a fine way to have natural selection. We can't be charged with the task of explaining why that is so! You _might_ want to write a sponsor seeking individual that "you prolly won't get very far with that programme or package", but that would be a courteous nicety on behalf of the maintainer, not a service Debian should provide. > 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. Then we don't have to change anything. -- Lars Bahner, http://lars.bahner.com/ Nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit, quam non sit.
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