On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 02:00:35AM -0500, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote: > On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Joel Baker wrote: > > (When there is no responsibility, things either never get fixed, or they > > get fixed in broken ways that nobody can track down the cause of, for > > one example - Developers put their reputation on the line in doing their > > packages, and for most of them, that *is* motivation to try to do work that > > Doesn't Suck - and, for that matter, to do work at all). > > > > I did not think such an approach would involve giving up personal > responsibility altogether, but merely taking more interest in the system > as a whole rather than just ones' parochial little packages. If you look > at the people doing the "big picture" stuff in Debian, it's quite small. > Can we make that group bigger? This was one idea there may be better > ones. Well, anyone who wants to volunteer can work for the debian-qa team. I've done some bug-squashing-party work, myself, but much of what's before the -qa team is intesive enough that I have trouble just casually helping out in between my porting work for the netbsd-i386 port. Unfortunately, the whole point of "volunteer" is that you can only ask for help, or encourage people to help, rather than (effectively) demand that they do. And, perhaps unsuprisingly, general BSPs (where one can target any package, including ones with minor bugs already patched that have never been NMUed but maybe should be) tend to get a lot more response than the attempt(s) at 'Core Bug' squashing parties. I mean, some bugs are just beyond your average DD's level of competance or time to spare (thankfully, most aren't...) The best way I know of to get more people to help the -qa folks is to give them some incentive. Unless you have more money than I to dump into it, that probably means a lot of praises, rather than a lot of material reward. And, for the record: the folks doing QA absolutely rock. It's an often thankless job, and they still do it. Three cheers. -- Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>
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