On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 08:37:01AM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 10:30:39AM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > Le mardi 27 février 2007 à 09:24 +0100, Eduard Bloch a écrit :
> > > And how do you help a maintainer that does not admit that he needs help?
> >
> > I can't believe people are thinking such crap.
> >
> > Please show me where a current maintainer of Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, the
> > glibc, the kernel, X.org or any such big group of packages said he
> > didn't need help for them.
> >
> > YES. WE NEED HELP. NOW.
> > We are *all* *COMPLETELY UNDERSTAFFED*.
> > We are drowning in bug reports and are not able to answer all of them,
> > especially old ones dating from the pre-teams era.
> >
> > Who is not acknowledging such obvious things?
>
> So how do you help a maintainer who refuses help if it is paid?
>
> OK. The large teams are *COMPLETELY UNDERSTAFFED*. Volunteer labor
> is not able to keep up. Suppose we or some outside organization like
> dunc-tank raised money to pay someone who could afford to work
> full-time, 40 hours a week, doing bug triage for these large projects.
>
> Would those projects refuse help if the people doing the work happened
> if some of the people who showed up to help you from not "drowning in
> bug reports" just happened to be paid by Debian or by an outside group
> to do this work for which you have so eloquently said it's hard to get
> volunteers, and for which others have said is completely unfun,
> tedious work?
>
> Even if one or two people (for reasons that I don't understand) would
> stop spending maybe 10-12 hours a week on top of whatever they do
> during the day to earn money to feed his family because there is now
> some paid help, I would think that raising money to find someone to
> work 40 hours a week would be a Good Thing....
You forgot a single damn point: in debian, like in many projects, the
one that "do" things is often the guy that "decide" things because he's
the one there. If you put people that work 5 times more as me because
they have the time to do that, I will obviously feel they took my
place. I'm not sure what I would do in those cases. Obviously not
refusing the help and people that have the time to do this, but I would
obviously lessen my implication and work for other teams where I've a
single damn chance to see my contribution to be compareable to the
others.
I would feel bad to impose my views to a person that has huges amounts
of time to work in the team. And necessarily (because of human nature)
a decision will happen that I would not like or would have made
differently, and at that point I guess that I would just leave.
Whereas in balanced teams where every contributor has the same level
of contribution, I would have argued my point, or tried to make the
proposal better, or discussed it or... whichever adequate behaviour in a
team where every single member is equal to the other.
Money introduces bias. OK you were talking about bug triaging, and bug
triaging is not necessarily a big decision making place, I agree. Though
it will depend a lot of the kind of people you want to recruit:
* if those are already contributors they will want to take more and
more decisions, and won't only do bug triaging: if you do bug
triaging you begin to know packages a lot, and become skilled
enough to take decisions, and so on. Then commits rights are
granted, and you take more and more responsibilities. That's good,
it's indeed what is often suggested to newcomers. Though we end up
in the not-so-nice situation I described.
* Or it's a one-time job (even if that need to be run for 6 month to
reduce the backlog we have in some teams) and well, I don't really
see the durability here.
If you really want to spend money to make bug triaging better, then
there is a lot of room for improvement in our BTS. At least it was our
BTS that made things the most painful when I dealt with bugs, and I had
to develop many tools, many url-crafters, many scripts to extract the
very information that I would have had in the first place. Not to
mention the absolutely horrible delays in the time the BTS needs to deal
with mails to control@ (but I know this improved a lot recently thanks
to the new host, dunno for how long though).
but please, I'm not sure there is a damn single maintainer in a big
team that will refuse help, paid or not. I don't really understand how
that mythical maintainer in a big team that refuses help has emerged in
the discussions, but I'd really like names here. In fact, that seems
pretty contradictory with the very notion of a team. Of course, there is
teams with 1 single member in it in debian, but that's not a "large
team" and is out of the scope if I'm not mistaken.
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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