On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:33:56 +1100 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). > For my part, the teams that appear to need help most desperately need > people with good skills in specific areas I don't have. That is always possible. I'm not going to start working on kernels or haskell or KDE. It's not just the skill set - if you don't use a package (as is my case with KDE), it's not a good choice for various perfectly valid reasons. > > If nobody is willing to do the grunt work of maintaining the > > alternative, the alternative does not get maintained. That's > > obvious, isn't it? > > How much of it is grunt work? Depends on the perspective - someone coming in to help from the outside may find it challenging (and therefore potentially enjoyable) - maintainers who have been working on the problems for a while it can be grunt work. Many of the necessary skills can be learnt IF the new people have sufficient interest in the package concerned and the wisdom to get along with the existing team. > Is there a way for willing people, who > lack the specific skills needed by the maintenance team, to bring more > general programming and/or packaging skills to bear on the workload? RFH bugs and general QA is the obvious place to start - once we're released Squeeze. Bug triage can be a good way to learn how the package works and how the team works. > 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. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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