Re: Four days

[Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org>]

On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 11:42:59AM -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:35:04 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> > Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com> writes:
> > 
> > > As someone who has attempted to go through the mentoring process, I
> > > agree very much that it is rather depressing.
> > 
> > How much of that is actually a problem, though? How much is an integral
> > part of gaining humility as to the state of the packaging work, and the
> > pain of learning new conventions and processes?
> 
> The depressing part is that almost no one is interested in being a
> mentor,

A state which isn't helped by the regular complaint that "there's nobody to
sponsor my packageeeeeees!".  When I *do* sponsor something, I'm pretty much
guaranteed to get at least one (other) person e-mail me personally with an
RFS that's never seen the light of day here, and it's pretty much always for
something I'd never touch (for some reason, it seems I see a lot of Java
packages that way).  Neither state of affairs encourages me to sponsor
anything.

> so its almost impossible to get your work into Debian, which
> makes the effort seem pointless.

Because having a nice package you can use yourself or put on a website
somewhere has *no* value at all, naturally.

> Note that I've actually succeeded many
> times, but I've also failed many times as well.  And the failures are
> all due to lack of an interested mentor, not due to package quality (a
> bunch of my packages are on mentors.debian.net and lintian clean).

Those are not the be-all and end-all gauges of quality.

> I think that the efficiency of mentoring is the problem that needs to
> be solved.  That could possibly be improved by treating mentoring tasks
> as bugs.  It may also possibly be improved by treating mentoring as a
> team task.  I see the complaint that DDs choose not to mentor because
> they end up stuck with unmaintained packages.  Well, it would be less
> of a burden if those were team maintained (make new mentees part of
> those teams as well).

Because packages that are unmaintained by a team that are indifferent are
not any different, practially speaking, than those that are unmaintained by
one person who is indifferent.

> Maybe mentorship should be a team effort?  Start
> a new group of mentees every month that work together perhaps?

Yeah, that's a great idea!  We should setup a mailing list where they can
get together and ask questions of each other and request someone to sponsor
their packages!

- Matt