Re: A lot of pending packages
Firstly, 7 days is a very short period of time to be waiting for
sponsorship, some have been waiting since 2006.
About your two packages:
autotrash: sounds like the functionality should be part of GNOME/KDE,
please talk to upstream about moving it there.
ardentryst: seems like a good fit for the Debian games team:
http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Team
We would definitely welcome new people, especially if they want to
work on other games than their own. Please note the games team is
having slight sponsorship issues too.
On to your mail....
The fact is that there just aren't enough people who have time and are
interested in sponsoring. Reviewing packages takes up a lot of time to
do properly, especially for new packages. It has been this way for as
long as I can remember. To fix this situation, we need:
More interest from DDs in sponsoring packages both within and outside
their areas of interest.
More motivation from DDs to spend more of their time on Debian and
less on other things like work, personal life, etc.
More interest from maintainers in putting effort into their packages.
More interest from maintainers in keeping the packages on mentors.d.n
up to date and automatic removal of mentors.d.n packages that haven't
been updated in more than X months.
More automated QA stuff for mentors.d.n and more visibility for that
info so maintainers actually notice issues.
Ways for maintainers to give answers to common sponsor questions along
with their upload so that the overhead for sponsors is reduced.
Some of the above is part of the proposed design for debexpo, which
really needs folks to step up and work on it (hint hint). Other parts
can be helped by sending DDs to DebConf, I've found that a big
motivator.
On a regular basis I look back through the -mentors archives for RFS
threads with no replies and do a review of a few that look
interesting. Most of the packages I look at during those reviews are
definitely not of sufficient quality to make me comfortable uploading
them. Many contain non-free stuff, lack source, FTBFS etc etc blah.
After I review them, often there are no replies, followups or updates
to the package at all. People posting RFS mails don't seem to put in
the effort to make good packages, which reduces my motivation to deal
with -mentors. And if I actually do an upload, then usually the
maintainer looses interest in Debian or in the package and it sits
there on my QA page gathering bugs and reducing my motivation.
Sometimes the package is beyond my skill level (such as Java or
complicated maintainer scripts) or written in languages I strongly
dislike (PHP), which means I review part of the package and will not
sponsor it.
Personally I won't be actually sponsoring packages on a regular basis
until debexpo is in better shape and gets deployed. The exceptions are
the occasional QA upload, RC bug fix, team upload or (much less
likely) when I'm actually impressed with the quality of the initial
RFS of a package.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Reply to: