Re: FYI: QA uploads primer
On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 12:53:32AM +0200, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 12:01:30AM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 23:00, Serafeim Zanikolas<serzan@hellug.gr> wrote:
> > > Thanks for the feedback Sandro. I've written the primer for technical-minded
> > > debian users that (a) want to contribute to debian, but are uncertain about
> > > their long-term time-commitment; and (b) given their uncertain commitment,
> > > won't read the whole policy, devref, and newmaint guide just for the sake of
> > > trying out the water.
> >
> > No, that's again wrong: you can't do a quality work without ready
> > those documents (with this order: policy, devref, NM Guide). This is a
> > false statement you're making and I'm stopping here reading your
> > email.
>
> There's a tradeoff: encouraging potential new contributors (in the hope that
> they'll eventually read all the docs) at the cost of initially lower-quality
> RFS requests, or making it clear from the start that packaging is hard and
> time-consuming and they shouldn't even bother until they've read all 3 docs in
> full [1]
Or you can point people who don't want to learn how to package things
properly to QA activities that their limited time and attention span can
cope with. Things like just making sure that the bugs on a package are in
good order, with well-tested patches and clear comments to that effect,
which reduces the time commitment for someone who *does* have the necessary
skills to produce a working package. Announcing their work on debian-qa
often finds someone to aggregate, test, and make the upload.
Anything that encourages people to submit even shoddier RFSes than some of
those that already come through here should be derided loudly and
publically.
- Matt
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