Ben Finney<ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Neil Williams<codehelp@debian.org> writes:
Can the rest of us now actually ask if there is anything we can do
to get more people involved in helping packaging teams which are
openly asking for help?
[…]
The problem is a lack of manpower in critical teams. That's not new.
Is the requirement for manpower alone? I thought the problem was a
lack of manpower with the appropriate specific skills.
Bug triage doesn't need huge amounts of package-specific skills. It
just needs the people doing triage to be able to cooperate with the
maintainer(s).
Is there an obvious way for people willing to do grunt work to help
such teams (as opposed to the highly skilled work done by the core
people in the maintenance team) to find that grunt work and begin
contributing?
Skills can be learnt, taught and developed - the missing component is
the person who can work alongside the existing team without lecturing
those in the team and without pestering the team with newbie questions.
That's fun for the whole team.
The more hard-pressed the team, the harder it is for new people to
learn the ropes. There's no answer to that problem except that new
people must want to learn, not lecture.
No matter what your expertise, the packaging team has different
expertise and everyone needs to get along to fix the actual problem.