Hello, On Sat 27 Aug 2022 at 04:22PM +02, Vincent Bernat wrote: > > On 2022-08-27 15:53, M. Zhou wrote: > >> That's why I still hope ftp team to recruit more people. This is >> a very direct and constructive way to speed up everything. >> More volunteers = higher bandwidth. >> Recruiting more people doesn't seem to have a serious disadvantage. > > It does not seem to work. Either people don't want to do that, either the FTP > team is too picky on the candidates. Some combination of both, but I don't think I'm suffering from bias if I say that it's at least 80% the former. Very few people who say they'd like to be trained confirm they'd still like to once they've had a look at the docs for trainees, and after that, hardly any do enough trainee reviews for the other team members to feel confident they can let them at it on their own. I am the only trainee who made it through in recent years and that's because I was highly systematic about doing lots of reviews each month. There are some technical improvements that would be possible. For example, feedback to trainees is entirely done via IRC; I would much prefer us to be doing that by e-mail. But other team members disagree with me, I think, and I do recognise I like e-mail more than most people do. There are ways the tools could be better. In general, however, existing team members, including myself, are pretty sceptical that technical improvements would be worth the time it would take to implement them effectively. dak as a whole is less well maintained than other core Debian software, but the NEW queue parts are pretty good! So, the bulk of the problem boils down to project members not being interested in doing the work. I certainly understand this. It feels just like grading student essays. Everyone finds that highly draining at first, until you develop a sort of detachment from the activity, where your mind is going through the motions of the activity sort of like how your hands can be going through the motions of something like food preparation for a familiar dish -- you have to learn that you won't make worse judgements if you become detached in this way, just like how you won't prepare a worse version of the dish if you do it in the detached way. Then I just applied what I'd learned from grading to the NEW queue, and then it's pretty fun and even relaxing when you're not in a frame of mind to do harder thinking. But like I said, most people don't want to do any of this, and of course being a trainee is *not* like that. And then recruitment is less efficient -- not enough feedback on trainee reviews -- because there aren't enough team members. The usual compounding effect. -- Sean Whitton
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