* Olivier Berger <olivier.berger@telecom-sudparis.eu> [2014-01-30 13:51:40 +0100]: > Hi. > > I'm not sure this is really a problem we should address. Sorry if I'm > overlooking details. > > I suspect we have quite a few orphaned old packages still in testing, > for which an ITA (Intent to Adopt) has been offered by a non DD, which > is waiting for sponsorship. Typically, some of these potential > maintainers may be active users or upstream maintainers. > > But who cares ? > > If such package are getting removed from testing (re. new release policy > experiment), maybe that would draw more attention to these pending > sponsorship requests (provided that DDs using them, or "educated" users are indeed > notified of the testing removal), and help bring back updated packages > and new maintainers in the loop ? > > I'm not sure we can back this discussion by figures of such pending > sponsorship requests, or if that could be counterproductive in the > end. Maybe testing removals isn't the best way to encourage more > mentoring and sponsorship (I'm thinking of the Mentoring of the Month > experiment in Debian-med that Andreas presented at the Paris Mini > Debconf recently, for instance). > I myself isn't very motivated to sponsor packages which I don't > use... but maybe I'm not noticing at all (or didn't read how-can-i-help > messages ;-). I'm pretty certain that you need to back this gut feeling with hard numbers: how many ITAs are _actually_ languishing? Furthermore, as I said on IRC, having an ITA'd package removed from testing is more likely to serve as a demotivation for the potential new maintainer, rather than incite a DD to take a look at a package. Why is this different than removing RC-buggy packages from testing? Well, the person whose package is removed has a better chance of understanding the reason of removal (the stick is used on the same population we want to motivate). I don't think that unilaterally using a stick on population A to motivate population B will ever work. But that's a gut feeling too. If you want to help the sponsorship processes long term, there are a lot of tangible things to do: - Read debian-mentors@l.d.o, provide advice, sponsor packages; - Enhance our infrastructure around sponsorship. The mentors.debian.net codebase is functional, but the todo list is long and the architecture could use some work; - Engage on a program that _is_ working long-term, such as the MoM (mentoring of the month) program as advertised by Andreas Tille. References: https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/ https://wiki.debian.org/Debexpo https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM HTH, -- Nicolas Dandrimont Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. (Linus Torvalds to Andrew Tanenbaum)
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