Re: New contributor experience
On 04/06/25 8:39 pm, Marc Haber wrote:
> Do you seriously think that people who can't be bothered with finding an
> IRC Client, pointing it to a server and joining a channel can be
> bothered with Debian's other peculiariaties?
Definitely. Many DDs don't use IRC. When I started, I didn't either (I am a DD btw).
I used to use matrix, and only joined IRC channels after I had my first few uploads
sponsored -- that too via matrix. Those were the days of Riot.chat later to be
known as element.
I eventually had to start using a proper IRC client because I had to reverify my nick
again and again, and I'd sometimes be randomly kicked out of channels mostly due
to quirks with matrix <-> IRC. But that's a different topic.
I was one of the few lucky ones who could find and interact with a DD (who would later be
my advocate too) on a matrix channel, and was willing to mentor there.
And when you say "pointing it to a server" the pre-requisite here is someone should "own" a server
for that. Many new contributors are university students, and they don't really have the money/provision
to pay for one (that was the case for me several years back). There are free instances available
(oracle free tier comes to mind), but they are often times unreliable.
You may argue that a contributor can find "someone" to setup a bouncer for them. But this is
pretty difficult if no-one around you does any of that.
> Will we have to change our
> packaging to writing just one file as other distributions do?
You are probably frustrated at this point, but you don't get to take it out on me as much as you
like. And you need to make peace with that fact.
Reply to: