Re: task & skills
On Sat, Dec 02, 2000 at 09:08:42PM +0100, Lenart Janos wrote:
> Hello!
>
> [ Well, I don't want to quote from Gergo's or Kumira's mail, I really
> hope that everyone read *and* remember them. ]
It would have be nice if you had. Then you might not have misspelt my name.
> I don't agree with Kumira's mail.
>
> I think our goal is to create a good, trustable OS, that one includes
> as much valuable program as much we can debianize. Currently Debian is
> stands for these. Debian is on the top because it's organised very
> well, it has high standards, DSC and others. Quality must be much
> more important than quanity. Am I right?!
Maybe. But you have not yet demonstrated that these applicants who have
been approved recently are any worse or better than existing maintainers.
Until you can provide something interesting (one or two cases aren't
statistically significant) you are just hand-waving and expending a lot
of hot-air.
> Our philosophy is 'help the applicants'.
' ... to help themselves'
> Approving them anyway (in
> the hope they won't screw up the user's system) is not good for anyone
Whom do you feel has been approved in spite of things?
<URL: http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint-discuss-0011/msg00103.html>
for example? The AM report isn't a good basis to judge the quality of
an applicant -- you don't know how many emails back and forth took place,
for example.
You aren't able to tell how esponsive a prospective maintainer is. Oly
the frontdesk and DAM are (since they get more detailed reports).
> Helping the applicants takes lot's of time from the applicants who can
> read those manuals before submitting their apply query. I don't think
> the NM process should be a 'school', and I don't know why AMs have to
Hey! That is what I said. See, if you'd quoted me you would not have ended
up agreeing with me (you said at the start of this message you were
opposed to my point of view).
> spend time for applicants who don't read manuals, just ask. They should
> be rejected after one or two questions. For example, that's trivial
> that some of them can't even use gpg, don't know about lintian, etc.
> Everyhing is written down clearly.
Eh? Perhaps the hungarian translation is better than the English one
but I get plenty of question about GPG all the time.
This is principally because most people use it infrequently. I mean
until you do a thing, like use gpg, you'll always feel hesitant.
>
> I have an idea: The applicant should must fill a form before apply.
> This form would contain questions like:
>
[snip - web questions]
> and, if he can answare 5/5 questions only then he can apply. Of course,
> there would be only questions that can be checked by a script. With
> this we can avoid web-surfers wasting AMs time.
Are you being sarcastic? The problems with that approach are many (see
the earlier archives of this mailing list -- are they available at all?)
one obvious one is that the database of questions is finite and we will
soon have been with a list of all the questions and correct answers
selling them.
>
> One other thing:
> BTS. Yes, BTS is exists, but that is for the bugs we don't know before
> upload (it should be for them!). Applicants who can't run lintian
> should be rejected without further questions or discussions.
No, those applicants who are unable to understand the output of lintian
and where to look for futher information should be dropped.
Any idiot can run a tool - not all of them can understand it.
Anand
--
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