Re: Fwd: Rejecting NM applicant Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
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Right. No one asked, but this thread ran on a public list so I'm going
to tell you anyway. Here's my summary of experience with the NM
process.
1. I did the normal startup stuff and eventually Fabio was assigned to me.
2. Fabio sent me what I presume is a fairly standard set of questions.
3. I had some weeks earlier read the New Maintainers Guide and the
Developer's Reference and put together a couple of simple .deb
files for some small packages I maintain. So, to answer Fabio's
questions, I spent an afternoon digging around on the web.
4. A couple of my answers were weak. I knew that. Fabio spotted them
and pushed back. Fair enough.
5. I dug around a bit more and provided another set of answers.
6. Fabio pushed back again pointing out that several of my answers
looked like I'd "cut and pasted" them and suggested that I should
recapitulate them in my own words.
Man, I thought, that's setting the bar pretty high.
7. I made another stab and sent answers to the first half or so of the
questions. Fabio said he'd wait until he had all of the answers
again. Fair enough.
8. Time passed. Eventually weeks passed. I started feeling guilty
about clogging up the process and told Fabio it'd be September at
least before I was able to free up enough time to try again.
9. Fabio suggested that he could either put me on hold or reject me.
10. I wrote back and said, why don't you put me on hold then.
11. Fabio wrote back and said sorry, he'd just rejected me.
C'est la vie. Is the process broken? I don't know. It's not my place
to say. I think the bar is set awfully high, but I presume that's
intentional. A couple of people in this thread pointed out that my
other experience may not translate directly into experience with
debian packaging. That's certainly true.
I find it a bit surprising that that single technical skill should be
such an important discriminating factor though. I'd have thought that
a broader range of technical skill and experience was desired.
Will I try again this fall. Perhaps. Does it matter? Not really. All
of the important packages I maintain are already packaged up
periodically by others.
If I'd made it through the process, I probably would have felt
motivated to add a "make deb" target to the build process and
published .deb files with each new release. As someone else pointed
out, there's nothing preventing me from doing that now. There's
nothing preventing me from building .rpm's either. Psychology being
what it is, I'm unlikely to feel motivated to do either in the short
term.
Obviously, I won't be participating in the organization in any other
way either. But I hardly think anyone will notice.
Be seeing you,
norm
- --
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | The future belongs to those who believe
http://nwalsh.com/ | in the beauty of their dreams.--Eleanor
| Roosevelt
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