Re: Use of the BTS for managing sponsorship
On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 02:05:48AM +0200, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> On Sun, 01 Sep 2002, Kristis Makris wrote:
> > On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 04:15, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> > > Colin Watson wrote:
> > > > Currently I see no way at all to find out whose requests for sponsorship
> > > > have gone unnoticed in a practical way, which I think is important.
> > > > Using the BTS would offer this quite easily. I'd love to know how you
> > > > keep track of this under the current system.
> > >
> > > I ask people with a short and simple email.
> >
> > Ehm...no you don't! I had to lurk around for a long time on
> > debian-mentors to get anybody's time to look into any of my (defective)
> > packages.
>
> Why should I sponsor _YOUR_ packages if I am not interested in them?
> Beeing sponsored is a privilige not a right and I fucking choose whom I
> offer that privilige.
How is this relevant to the question I asked above, then? I maintain
that it's important to have a practical way to get a list of potential
sponsorees whose requests haven't been dealt with. The fact that you can
scattergun a few requests you happen to spot isn't really helpful.
I don't much care whether the list is displayed as part of the BTS or
elsewhere, but I think it is important that it should exist. It
certainly doesn't imply that any one person should have to deal with all
of it, nor that even all requests on the list have to be dealt with.
However, it would provide a little more reasonable expectation that if
your requests go unanswered it might actually be because nobody is
interested and not because the people who might be interested happened
to be busy that week and then didn't have time to go trawling through
the archives later to catch up.
For comparison, we don't expect maintainers to be watching debian-user
every minute of the day so that they spot bug reports going past on
their packages. Instead, we organize them in a sensible way and make
sure that when a maintainer finds time to work on any given package they
have a convenient archived list of all the bug reports that have not yet
been addressed. Maybe you don't find
http://bugs.debian.org/weasel%40debian.org useful, but I certainly find
it difficult to get along in Debian development without my corresponding
page. Since I consider sponsoring prospective maintainers to be a
worthwhile task, and one which always has a supply of work to be done, I
think the two situations are comparable.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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