Re: fresh blood gets congested: long way to become DD
Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 04:36:47AM -0300, Blu Corater wrote:
>> I have considered many times to apply to become part of the proyect, but
>> nowdays I more often regret not having done it back then, mainly because
>> with the current states of things I find quite ridiculous to be evaluated
>> for more than three years to be accepted.
>
> The average, though, seems to be something less than 1 year.
I doubt that. It took four months until I got an AM assigned (since then the
list of applicants-to-be-assigned has risen more, by approx. 50%) and
extrapolating DAM approval rate from the recent three months it'll take
eight months until my application gets reviewed. So it's at least a year of
waiting alone, which is quite a disproportion to the thirteen days it took
me to pass ID check, P&P and T&S.
> The current bottleneck in the NM process is that the rate at which new
> applicants apply exceeds the rate at which our existing application managers
> can accept applicants. Unless you're arguing that Debian should not attempt
> to assess incoming applicants *at all*, I don't see how you can claim that
> this is caused by people trying to make Debian too elitist.
>
> Criticizing people on this list
> isn't going to help that problem; the developers who subscribe to -newmaint
> are already doing what they can to get applicants integrated into the
> project.
I know that the burden is carried by only a handful of people and I don't
have the slightest intention to blame the involved persons.
> In Richard's mail, he wrote that the fact that people complain about the NM
> queue periodically is proof that there is a critical problem that needs
> resolving. This is a valid interpretation of the facts, but I don't believe
> it's a correct one. An equally valid interpretation is: once people start
> complaining, they don't know what to stop. Because of past problems with
> the queue, we find ourself entertaining complaints that it takes three years
> to become a DD when that simply isn't true.
As being directly affected I can tell you that it's not working very well.
If the AM- and DAM-queues were almost empty it would work, but the current
state is counter-productive and scaring away people from contributing.
It's easy to rant about Ubuntu, but they're not only successful because they're
backed by a gazillionaire who pays developers full-time, but also because
they're using a more open approach. If Ubuntu had chosen an NM-like procedure
they'd only have gotten external people to work in the recent months.
Endless sponsoring is a waste of time, both for the DD-to-be, who has additional
work like preparing his new package for download, sending explanations along etc.
and the sponsor, who needs to review the upload again.
Personally it hurts my productivity quite significantly to the extent that I
concentrate on tasks that don't require DD privileges. There have been several
cases where a DTSA would have been desirable and several long-standing sid security
problems that I could easily fix, but for which I consider my time too valuable
to play sponsoring ping-pong.
Cheers,
Moritz
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