Hi,So I'm sitting here thinking about this thread, while spending the greater part of my Christmas holiday slogging through T&S questions. It seems timely to me...
Maybe we should split the template in SVN and encourage AMs to use the new version?
I entirely agree with that, for the reasons stated and another.It strikes me that testing whether or not I can spend 40 hours in a week doing all my T&S stuff in one big hit is not very useful to Debian. My impression, after living with a DD for years, is that what is more useful to Debian are people who are prepared to put in a long commitment that will mainly involve small amounts of work that are distributed in time, but which ideally require a quick response as they come up (ie to fix a bug that appears in your package, but there might not be a bug for weeks or longer at a time).
Given this, I think a better model for spacing the questions would be to send a NM applicant a few questions every couple of weeks, and to pay attention to whether they were able to fit in this workload with the rest of their life, whether they were able to sustain that level of workload for several months, and whether they were able to respond fairly quickly, in general, to a new piece of work appearing for them to do. I think that is probably closer to what Debian actually needs from it's maintainers.
This would of course involve a bit more work for the AMs, who would have to deal with more smaller interactions with their NM applicants... But I am inclined to think that anyone who is prepared to read the pages and pages of stuff I have written in answer to the questions so far can probably find the time to send a few more small emails...
Anyway, that doesn't explain why I am trying to tackle T&S in one big hit, but I'm not the ones testing me :)
This comment is not intended in any way as criticism of my excellent AM, who is consistently helpful and friendly, and who is stuck with working within this silly system as much as I am. Thanks, Frank :)
Helen.