Experiences of being an AM
Hi,
I'm now an AM for some time, and want to share some of my experiences:
I changed the usual template question about writting a man page to:
| N. Have you ever written a man page? If so, please tell me which. If not,
| please take a look at http://qa.debian.org/man-pages.html and
| choose a package listed there. Then please write a man page for it,
| submit it to the BTS and tell me the bug number for it please.
Reason: If someone has already written a man page, it's ok of course.
This question
| O. What are maintainer scripts? What arguments does each get?
| What is the meaning of the arguments? What can each of them
| assume about the system?
has received some (IMHO fair) critics that just more or less copying
the specific policy section cannot be too useful. So, I intend to
change it to something like:
| O. What are maintainer scripts? What are the major operation modes?
| What can each of them assume about the system? Where can you
| get more information about them?
I doubt the value of these questions
| W. Fundamental runtime linker knowledge:
|
| W2. What is a symbol-versioned library? Why are libdb2, libdb3 and libc6
| compiled using symbol versioning? What problems does symbol-versioning
| solve?
|
| W3. What is the -Bsymbolic ld flag, exactly what does it do, and how
| that differs from library symbol versioning? What problems do
| -Bsymbolic linking solve? Why is libc6 not compiled with
| -Bsymbolic?
for the NM process. This is a highly difficult thing, and there is
even no consensus in Debian what's the recommended way of operation
is. IMHO, it might be better to hint the applicants to e.g. the paper
of Ulrich Drepper, and e.g. ask them how they deal if upstream changes
to often the name of libraries.
What would help me: If I can do private comments on nm.d.o, so that I
can track there the status of my applicants at a very detailed level
(instead of using a text file for that); also, a "custom" date-field
that's shown directly at my main page (and not presented to the
outside world) would help me in tracking inactive applicants.
Comments on this are highly appreciated.
Cheers,
Andi
--
http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
PGP 1024/89FB5CE5 DC F1 85 6D A6 45 9C 0F 3B BE F1 D0 C5 D1 D9 0C
Reply to: