RFH usefulness (was: Re: negative vote for maintainer Michael Gilbert)
On Thu, January 5, 2012 19:03, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> writes:
>
>> Then, did you fill an RFH? If not, you should do it right away.
>
> RFH's serve almost no point at present. 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, and if you had time to mentor them, you wouldn't be asking for
> help in the first place.
I dare to disagree on the serving almost no point. I do agree that filing
such a thing is not a panacea and not likely to attract a new maintainer
just because of the simple fact that you filed the bug.
However, from time to time when I had a problem with a specific package,
and I saw the bug in question tagged help or the entire package marked RFH
(this is clearly displayed in the PTS). This was an indication for me that
putting work into the package, preparing an upload to fix the problems
that were bothering me, would be acceptable for the maintainer and that I
could do that right now. Lacking such an RFH I would probably have started
out by sending something to the BTS and wait a while for maintainer
response. So it does serve some purpose in flagging to passers-by: "by all
means, please do what you can to improve this package".
Thijs
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