Please create a Debian Human project
I've been holding my self back from writing this for quite a while. This
rant stems from my almost 2 years of frustration of trying to join the
debian community and create a meaningful contribution to the project. I
hope that the reader will understand that it is embarrassing to me to
expose myself so much, so, for that reason, I'm writing this message
anonymously.
I have contributed to other projects, I have in fact been working with
software development for a bit over 4 years. I have contributed to other
OSS projects and I know that it is hard to get the attention of someone
who is working on a software using his(her) free time. I'm used to harsh
replies, rotting patches, thankless work and pure simple indifference.
But nowhere I felt so abandoned as in the debian project.
Contributing to debian is hard. Communication seems to be the toughest
problem that most human beings seem to face trying to interact with the
veterans. Bugs are left to rot for years, emails to other developers are
often never replied, even requests to help, of any shape through either
the mailing lists or the IRC channels can be completely ignored.
Once you finally get the attention of a Debian Developer or a Debian
Maintainer, more often than not, you are going to get a backslash. You
either have not read the necessary guide, FAQ or policy and because of
that the best you are going to get is the tersest retort for you to
conform yourself to the Debian standards. I can count in one hand the
number of times that I was lucky enough to get this far.
All that make those sporadic emails calling for contributions look like
some sadistic taunting, an attempt incite me to keep investing pointless
work into a project that have no interest in what I do.
And now that I'm starting to see contributions from the new developers
from the Debian Women project I'm appalled with difference of treatment.
Almost all their emails, questions and patches get educated and helpful
replies. The difference is so vast that to me it feels like they are
part of a completely different project. If I contributed with a female
name would I get treated like that?
Which brings me to the title of this email. I'm terribly jealous of the
Debian Women newbies, but I do not want to have females receive the same
kind of attitude that I did during my sad journey. What I want is that
every other human being to receive the same kind of attention that my
women counterparts seem to have.
I want is that when a developer asks what can he do to help he gets an
reply rather than silence or in the best case an hyperlink, that when
somebody writes an malformed patch or bug ticket he gets a reply to do
in such and such way. And if none of that is possible sometimes even bad
human contact is better than no contact.
If giving such kind of attention seems unreasonable because veterans are
overworked, I would like to suggest that perhaps older contributors are
overworked because they can't train enough new maintainers to share the
load.
All of this can be my fault. Maybe I'm just inadequate to work with the
project, maybe I always asked for help to the wrong people, at the wrong
places, maybe I read all the outdated guidelines FAQ's and whatnot. But
even if all my opinions are wrong and I have no right to complain, I
think that this message have reached its purpose, for it's the intent of
a rant to be heard and to be listened is all I wanted.
Anonymous.
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