Re: negative vote for maintainer Michael Gilbert
"W. van den Akker" <listsrv@wilsoft.nl> writes:
> On Thu, 2012-01-05 at 10:03 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> If you're lucky, you get a few responses from people saying they want
>> to help but with no idea how to go about it, ...
> To be a little off-topic but... I have many times offered my help to
> maintain orphaned and non-orphaned packages, but I was lucky when I got
> a response. Mostly I didnt got any.
I do want to be clear on this -- this is not a problem with the people who
want to help! Not at all! The problem is more that we don't have a great
education, training, and mentoring system in Debian, in part because it's
an all-volunteer project, mentoring is hard for many people, and many
people prefer to use their scant resources to work on their own stuff
rather than on training other people. I think we'd all *like* to train
more people and do more mentoring, but it's hard to balance time and
resources and make it happen.
I don't at all mean to say that those requests to help are not welcome.
They are! The problem is, rather, that by the time one has gotten to the
point of needing to file an RFH, frequently the only person who can really
effectively help is another Debian Developer who doesn't need training or
mentoring to step in, since the maintainer has already run out of time to
maintain the package (which is generally much easier than mentoring
someone else in how to maintain the package).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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