Re: FTP Team -- call for volunteers
On 14.03.20 22:41, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 09:18:48PM +0000, Neil McGovern wrote:
>> Hi debian-project and ftpmaster folks,
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 01:37:59PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
>>> - cope well with flames in response to your decisions
>>
>>> - after training, comfortable with being on the other end of the
>>> ftpmaster@ alias, which receives a huge volume of
>>> not-always-pleasant messages daily.
>>
>> I hope I am not the only one to be deeply concerned that this should be
>> a requirement on volunteers. For me, it is absolutely unacceptable that
>> people should put up with unplesentness or flames that come from doing a
>> difficult job. Putting this in the requirements is, for me, a failure of
>> the project.
>>
>> Sean: do you have any ideas on how we can reduce this aspect of the
>> valuable work that ftpmasters do? Do you have some (anonymised) examples
>> of the areas of abuse that you receive perhaps?
>>
> The fact is that given the length of time packages can wait for NEW
> processing and the amount of effort package maintainers put into
> packaging, it is understandable that they would be frustrated at the
> rejection of a package. That said, it does not make flaming the FTP an
> acceptable response and is certainly not going to produce any positive
> result. But it is not clear that it would be possible to prevent such a
> thing.
>
> It seems like if NEW processing only took a short time (perhaps 1 or 2
> weeks), then a rejection would be less frustrating. However, a
> rejection after waiting 11 or 12 months (or longer) and no response to
> requests for additional guidance when something is unclear are difficult
> to deal with from the package maintainer side.
>
> The delays may be unavoidable, but any measures to minimize them would
> go a long way to reducing the likelihood of flame responses to rejection
> mails.
In theory, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", making the
*packaging process* more visible would alleviate this problem. Not
having a package accepted can be interpreted as a bug on the packagers
side, so if the culture of Debian packaging would be amended so that
packagers do the packaging in public, f.ex. on Salsa, then those
"packaging bugs" could be spotted and fixed earlier, relieving the ftp
masters.
The packagers can then invite the public to have a look and to
criticize, making the packaging more fit for the strict judgement of the
ftp masters...
*t
*t
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