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Re: DPL teams review 2008



I'm not a DD, nor a DM... I'm in NM though, I hope my answers will be
accepted ;)

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:02:40 +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

> 1. You
> ------
> 
> a. What's your name, and where are you from? How long have you been
>    involved in Debian?

David Paleino, Italy.
I've been directly involved in Debian for nearly one year -- have been a happy
user for about 6/7 years now.

> b. What do you do outside of Debian - are you a student with lots of
>    free time, or are you employed full-time with a family and lots of
>    other commitments?

I'm a University student -- studying Odontology (or Dentistry, call it whatever
you want) in Palermo. Thus I don't really have much free time, but I try to
help Debian as much as I can.

> c. How much time *can* you comfortably spend on Debian work in a
>    typical week? And how much time *do* you spend on Debian work?
>    (Yes, I know these can be very different!)

I could spend... let's say, 1-2 hours a day. But, currently, I don't have any
Internet access (but on weekends and holidays -- i.e. when I go back home from
University). Thus I spend about 4-5 hrs (sometimes less) on Saturdays, and 1-2
hrs on Sundays.

> d. What packages do you maintain? How well do you cope? Are you part
>    of a team for those packages, or do you work on them on your own?
>    How much time do you need to spend, on average? Are they in good
>    shape?

I actively maintain some packages, others are all team-maintained. I've adopted
gthumb, libx86 and john, and I'm trying to track down all the filed bugs for
those. I've ITPed (and had sponsored): gnome-rdp, pinot, clamtk, fuseiso,
libopenraw, xpn, packeth. I've also adopted syslog-summary, for which I've
become upstream (it was a Debian-native package -- I intend to "port" it to
other distributions as well).

All packages are generally good in shape -- at least packages I've not adopted.
For the adopted packages, I'm generally in contact with upstreams to track down
problems. Others seem pretty in good shape.

I also maintained lots of Perl modules -- but I've lost interest in pkg-perl
(of which I was^Wam a member), so I removed myself from Uploaders and expecting
those to disappear from my QA page with new uploads.

> e. How would you rank all of your tasks in order of importance?

My main task surely would be maintaining my packages well. Secondly, I've
maintained the "web infrastructure" of Debian-Med. We currently see our SVN
activities on web, have l10n support to the website [0] itself, with dynamic
generation of .mo files. We also have dynamic generation of our "Group
Policy" (just modify a .tex file in SVN... and here you got the HTML ready).
I'm looking forward to improve my work in Debian-Med in this sense, since
there's no dentistry-related FOSS available anywhere (yes, I'm working to make
one myself!)

[0] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/

> f. Finally, are you having fun working on Debian? Why/why not?

Yes, sure :). I feel part of a greater family, and this satisfies me! Isn't
that enough? ;)

> 2. Teams you're in
> ------------------
> 
> (please answer this section multiple times where appropriate, once per
>  team, but *excluding* teams for maintenance of individual packages)
> 
> a. What teams do you work on? Are you an "official" member of those
>    teams?

Debian-Med actively (well, when I have time)
Bash-Completion (just entered the team, should start working on it soon)

I'm also member of these other teams, but not (anymore) actively working in
them:

Custom Debian Distributions (I work on this rarely, when I need to change
something for Debian-Med)
Debian Bluetooth (pkg-bluetooth)
Debian Forensics (forensics)
Debian Italian Maintainers Task Force (pkg-italian)
Debian Perl Group (pkg-perl)
Debian XFce Packages (pkg-xfce)
Python Modules Packaging Team (I currently maintain only nouvelle there --
python-modules)

I'm on official member for all these teams -- but I believe one day or another
I'll request the removal of my account (since they uselessly bloat my Alioth
page ;)) -- no, really. It's non-sense being a member and doing nothing (--
lack of time, mainly).

> b. How well do you think those teams are performing, in terms of
>    getting things done? How are daily/regular tasks dealt with? And
>    how about less common, one-off things?

I can't really talk for any team. My participation in debian-med has become
quite rare at the moment (just studying a lot, that's it). But we had lack of
uploads by DDs -- now that Charles Plessy <plessy@d.o> has become a DD, I
believe the general situation has improved.

I can say something about pkg-perl. There they have really great co-ordination,
and Damyan Ivanov <dmn@d.o> does a very good job as the team "leader". Kudos
also to Gregor Herrmann <gregoa@d.o> and Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@d.o> from that
team! I believe the team could work alone with these three people ;)

> c. How do members of your teams communicate with each other about what
>    they're working on? And how do they (as individuals or as a team)
>    communicate with people outside of the team? Do you feel they
>    coordinate well?

We communicate via e-mail (mailing list). We also have a IRC channel
(#debian-med on OFTC -- which I've created for improving communication) which
is quite orphaned -- lack of time by anyone.
I feel we coordinate well -- anyone can work on anyone's package, and if
there's a major change (see: Group Policy, Web Infrastructure, Repository
Layout), a proposal is sent to the mailing list before doing anything. That
seems great to me!

> d. Are there enough resources for your teams to do their jobs well? If
>    not, what's missing?

Man power. And time, *time*, TIME. :)

> e. Anything else you'd like to mention?

No, thanks.

> 3. Other teams
> --------------
> 
> a. What contact, if any, do you (as an individual) have with other
>    teams? How well does that contact work?

I don't really have any contact with teams I'm not member of. Really, I can say
I sometimes subscribed too fast to a team, without "lurking" (or whatever) it
for enough time.

> b. How well do your team(s) interact with other teams?

Mainly via e-mail (post to the proper mailing lists) -- I've seen contact
sometimes also on IRC, but I can't be more specific (just thoughts coming out).

> c. If you have any issues in (a) or (b), how would you suggest to fix
>    them?

No, any issue (AFAICT).

> d. Any other observations about the various teams in Debian?

No.

 Other stuff
> ===========
> 
> That's the list of things I'm hoping to learn more about from this
> review of teams.

Thanks for your work, Steve!

> But please keep those separate from this survey - it'll help me to avoid my
> head exploding in all directions... :-)

Help! /me hides under a pillow

HTH,
David

-- 
 . ''`.  Debian maintainer | http://wiki.debian.org/DavidPaleino
 : :'  : Linuxer #334216 --|-- http://www.hanskalabs.net/
 `. `'`  GPG: 1392B174 ----|---- http://snipr.com/qa_page
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