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Re: New contributor experience



On 04/06/2025 17:26, Russ Allbery wrote:
Ahmad Khalifa <ahmad@khalifa.ws> writes:

But something has to break the cycle. There is no daily standup or a
project manager to come in and ask for updates here :)

Debian has the RFA process, orphaning, submitting another RFH, etc...

I don't know, but seems no one wants to solve this and the status quo is
fantastic as it is.

I think you are reading lack of interest or opposition into a situation
where the primary problem is lack of resources.

No, I understand the below paragraph about running out of energy. And I do appreciate you taking the time with your analysis here.

I just thought there would have been a much higher willingness to discuss how to improve things. I was wrong.

I would love to solve this. I do not like the status quo. I certainly
don't think the status quo is fantastic. I'm also massively behind on the
packages that I already agreed to be responsible for and other Debian work
that I am supposed to be doing, and given that my day job exhausts nearly
all of my available energy for high-interaction discussions, I don't have
the bandwidth to mentor newcomers. I suspect this is a very common problem
among experienced Debian maintainers.

This says bad things about the project's sustainability and I think
everyone knows that. No one thinks the situation is good. But knowing that
things need to improve does not create the time and energy required to
improve them; in fact, in my experience, it sadly often does the opposite.

It's a trap and I'm not sure how to get out of it, but the problem isn't
lack of caring. It's that we have to figure out a way to get out of the
trap without piling more work on people who can't handle more and will
start dropping even more things if people insist.

This is not different from other projects, except that debian has a lower percentage of paid contributors. They all solve it by prioritising important things, dropping less important things, etc... I don't like it, but reality!

Basic prioritisation is where the idea of timing out older WNPP issues comes from. The other point is that if debian can't handle its current workload, why is debian inviting people to package 20 year old projects that don't even have an upstream page.

Anyway, I learned to ignore most WNPP pages now.


--
Regards,
Ahmad


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