"M. Zhou" <lumin@debian.org> writes: > To be honest, in terms of volunteered reviewing work, waiting > for several months is not something new. In academia, it may > take several months to years to get a journal paper response. Sure, but (1) that situation isn't popular in academia either, (2) at least you can put your work on arXiv or similar and have it be useful to people right away, and (3) a paper that's finally accepted (usually) doesn't ever have to be updated, and doesn't risk needing to go through the process again. And new papers don't require updates to old papers, usually. An analogy following from (3): how great fun it would be if a substantial paper correction would require no review from the publishing journal, but a title change would require a completely new peer review process! (Yes, the idea of a title change is far fetched, but still.) Seems a bit arbitrary to me. > I've ever tried to think of possible ways to improve the process, but > several observations eventually changed my mind, and I'm willing > to accept the status quo. > > * there is a trade-off between rigorousness and efficiency. > Any change in the process may induce disadvantages, where > the most difficult thing is to reach an agreement. > * we will add more work for ftp team if we get them involved in the > discussion of possible (but unsure) ways to improve NEW. > > My ultimate opinion on NEW processing is neutral, and my only > hope for ftp team is to increase the pace of hiring new members. > To be concrete, it is much harder to write a concrete proposal > to debian-vote@l.d.o than discussing possibilities. > > I understand we may have the enthusiasm to sprint on something. > However, in terms of the long-term endeavor on Debian development, > the negligible popcon number won't be less disappointing than > a long-term wait to clear the NEW queue. I don't think I'm worried about people being disappointed (by say an RC bug being filed due to a copyright issue – correctness is far more important than not being disappointed). I'm worried about the extremely long time horizons putting people off from contributing in the first place, because it requires focus and planning across a time gap that is so many orders of magnitude longer than the time spent doing the actual contributing work. In some sense, contributing to Debian becomes mostly about waiting. (Sure, there is something to be said about extremely short, fragmented attention spans being unhealthy – but some contributions are naturally short and easy, and we certainly don't want to drive those away.) > If one's enthusiasm on working on some package is eventually > worn out after a break, then try to think of the following question: > > Is it really necessary to introduce XXX to Debian? I hope we won't try to define what "necessary" means, or have it become a criterion for inclusion :-) > Must I do this to have fun? I don't think Debian contribution has ever been a necessary condition for fun. That's an incredibly high bar. If we were only to attract people whose only idea of fun was contributing to Debian, I think we'd become a very unhealthy project (and one severely lacking in contributors). > Strong motivations such as "I use this package, seriously" are not > likely to wear out very easily through time. Packages maintained > with a strong motivation are better cared among all packages in our > archive. I humbly disagree. Even from my own point of view, I may well be very motivated to package something I use seriously all the time, seriously. But then I see its dependency chain of 10 unpackaged items, start thinking about the probability that they'll *all* clear the NEW queue, and how long that would take, and I give up. And then there's the problem of attracting smaller contributions, as mentioned above: I really believe that people get put off from putting in 30 minutes of work for a nice MR on Salsa if they can't expect their work to hit the archives for months and months (suppose for example they contributed to a package whose SONAME is being bumped). > Why not calm down, and try to do something else as interesting > as Debian development when waiting for the NEW queue? Sure. That's what I do. My list of joyful and less joyful things to fill my days with is enormous. **BUT: I worry for the project if our solution to the problem at hand is "maybe just contribute less to Debian".** Is that really what we want? Best, Gard
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