On 15-Jul-2005, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo <fenio@debian.org> said: > > On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 12:10:50AM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote: > >> If you can't understand what you are packaging, you shouldn't be > >> packaging it, IMHO. > > So maybe our documentation should state that? > > Err, I thought that was common sense. Evidently not. > Being a developer is far more than being a glorified packager. The > DD is responsible for hacking the package to make it fit current and > future policy dictates (so one may need to change configuration file > locations, for example). It requires the DD to triage bugs for > upstream, and actively help in debugging the software, and > participating in the development, and improving it. Yet all of this is far less visible, to those new to the project, than the act of having one's name in the Maintainer field of a package. To you, and to just about all developers, the above is "common sense"; but that's irrelevant to the prospective package maintainer who doesn't have much history with the project. > Perhaps we should not give people a false sense of what being a DD > entails? Education is a difficult thing. Finding and quelling misinformation, as you suggest, is not exclusive with giving positive information. I would think a good place for that is in the one place we tell people to look when starting out with packaging: the Debian packaging documentation. -- \ "I went to San Francisco. I found someone's heart." -- Steven | `\ Wright | _o__) | Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au>
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