Re: Taking care of exising packages
Leinier Cruz Salfran schrieb:
El mié, 19-08-2009 a las 20:07 +0200, Patrick Matthäi escribió:
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Leinier Cruz Salfran schrieb:
Hello
I want to take this opportunity to add that the bugs need to be
addressed, especially the wish list. There are people who send bugs to
request to be added or taken into consideration certain properties and
functionality in the packages and maintainers are ignoring. Another
Examples?
Personaly on wishlist items (new upstream functionalitys) it is the job
of upstream to address them, the maintainer should forward it to them
and maybe upstream does not want it?
You're right in that part, it all depends from the point of view we
look, now evaluate this: if the sender requests that maintainer of the
package to take into consideration to add or modify any part of the
package, or add something missing and that can be added? For example, if
I create a program in Perl or Python, I pack and upload it and someone
asks me to consider adding a file that may help, or someone requests a
modification of the code? That is what I mentioned in my previous post.
Modifying isn't as easy as a patch sounds in most cases, because you may
also break the usage of it, like ABI/API incompatibilities.
thing is the system of new packages (debian-mentors,
mentors.debian.net) .. I think that there could be a team dedicated to
addressing this important task, same as the team dedicated to the
kernel, the core packages, translation, among other important packages.
I think you do not know how much work it is to sponsor a packages,
especially if it is NEW or the maintainer does not have enough
experience yet and the whole sponsoring requests ends up in a 30 mails
conversation..
I do not think you're right in that part. I do not deny that I lack
experience, but I know that to create a package takes time and
dedication and thus, to evaluate and see if the package meets the
minimum requirements takes more time. For the same reason is that, as a
suggestion, I explained to DD to assess the possibility of creating a
team of DD that can be charged with this task that is as important as
many other
In my opinion it would not help to creae a special force team for it.
Currently there are many DDs who are looking on mentors for potentioal
sponsorings. Most people have a quick lock at the package and decide
then if they are able/interested in sponsoring it, as a sponsor you also
have some more or less obligations about the package.
Personally I do not want to sponsor gnome apps, because I do not realy
know the gnome internals, etc etc.
Please also note that every DD is doing this work in his free time, this
would be still the case if we have got a special sponsoring team - the
current situation wouldn't get better with this.
I believe that this significantly affects the quality of the
distribution
Debian has the biggest software repository of every distribution.
I do not think that it is a *such important* part to include new software.
The most important RFS reports are such which fixes bugs (especially RC
ones).
I agree with you in the part that is more important to address a package
that updates or fixes a bug, but it is also important to address the new
revenue package.
Yes and no. That is just a question of priorities:
1) rc bugfixing
2) any other bugfixing
3) new packages
An example of this, when I started using Debian one of the things that
impressed me was the amount of programs, games, tools, and libraries
that exist in the repository. Just ordered a 'apt-get' and was installed
and almost ready to use.
Yes this also was in the past one reason why I switched to Debian. :-)
For some weeks I take a look on the mentors mail archive and the
packages list for sponsors on mentors.debian.net - I wanted to sponsor
packages which are waiting since "ages" to get uploaded.
My result was, that most packages are more or less quickly uploaded, but
neither the sponsor and maintainer replied to the thread on the mailing
list / removed the package from mentors, which is bad.
I have for you a scenario: Suppose you're excited about Debian, you like
Debian, you want to help to make Debian better and spend part of your
time to package a program, game, tool or a library. When you finished,
you test it with 'lintian', install, uninstall, then uploaded to the
'mentors.debian.net' and finally sent an RFS. Spend one week, two weeks,
three weeks and it's time that you ask yourself: What is happening?
Until the time comes to desist from a help and good day, after a very
long time, you receive a message talking about a DD package, then what
are you doing? And the time comes that you no longer want to help. A
good day, after a very long time, you receive a message from a DD
talking about your package, what you would do in that time?
I personaly know how frustrating it may be..
Personaly I think it would be a good idea to implement a new system for
sponsoring requests, which could be tracked.
The current situation with a bit of mentors.debian.net and some
communication about this ML and also a little bit about the OFTC IRC
channel isn't very open, because we could not realy track it without
spending some more efforts in it..
This is what I meant :)
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