Re: How to be a great Debian Developer
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 03:37:59PM -0500, Matej Cepl wrote:
> Well, I really do not care about sexyness of my work. I have just
> participated in the development of the program (actually, it is
> just a script for vim), which seems to be very interesting for
> me (so I hoped it may be interesting for others as well). I have
> created a Debian package for it and I thought, that it would be
> nice if the package begun to be part of the official Debian
> distribution so that other people won't have to reinvent the
> wheel. I certainly do not have time to maintain more packages or
> to do any other works just to allow it. If there is no other way,
> I will maintain the package on my own website, but it seems silly
> to me.
>
> What's so wrong with maintaing just one package?
Are you more "loyal" to the package or to Debian? If your package
couldn't be included, would you still develop for Debian? When you grow
tired of working on the upstream, will your attention to the Debian
package flag as well, until the release manager has to remove it because
it's abandoned? Will you be willing to give up the maintainership of
your program when someone more able and willing to maintain it wants to?
If your purpose is to have your program in Debian, then you could file a
Request-for-Packaging bug in the WNPP metabug in the bug-tracking system.
If someone (whose judgement is unclouded by pride) reads your RFP and
decides that it's worthy to go in the main archive, then it's probably
worthy.
Let me give a personal example: I wrote a program that uses the XMLRPC
features of Advogato to edit one's diary there. People loved it. There
are about two dozen people who regularly use it. I made it into a
package, and put it in my personal repository, rather than upload it.
Why? Because two dozen users isn't important enough to use Debian's FTP
space. Our repository is HUGE, almost too big to rsync to some mirrors
regularly. That hurts users. My ego and the convenience of a handful of
people isn't worth wasting even more space.
On the other hand, if you're more interested in being a slave to Debian
than you are in having your own package in Debian, then you should apply.
- chad
Reply to: