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Re: Advocacy for Jari Aalto



Hi,

On Wed, 22 May 2013, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> * Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>, 2013-05-21, 21:52:
> >I think Jari would be a very valuable asset in Debian, and that he
> >should be made DD.
> 
> I very much disagree.

I'm with Jakub. My interactions with Jari have been rather on the bug
reports front, but he tends to care a lot about issues which are not
important at all. He doesn't seem to be able to weigh the usefulness of
his reports towards the time it costs for others to deal with them.

He made a number of dubious NMUs (just to upgrade the packaging to
newer debhelper/source formats/etc) and he doesn't seem to be aware of
the requirements for uploads during the freeze [1].

He started a mass bug filing without any coordination [2].

The amount of packages that he maintains alone, i.e. outside of any team
is also worrying (in terms of willingess and ability to work with others).
Quite a few packages are lagging behind new upstreams versions (I count 8
on his DDPO page) but that's to be expected when one maintains so many
packages.

I looked into a random package with bugs, I picked "zoo" to see what I could find:

A recent fix:
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/zoo.git;a=commitdiff;h=fd1a30d151cc0b74558af41b09ddafbf9978c16d
was only needed because his debian/rules rewrite (for dh support)
completely dropped the differentiated target (make linux/linux64) thas was
present when he took it over:
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/zoo.git;a=commitdiff;h=f138eb3a46635849af0cb04b0099cc3f722203f8

The linked bug reports mention a cleaner solution (i.e. to rely on
a built-in define instead of a manually added one) but he didn't
update the patch accordingly. He just resurrected the old approach.

In the end, I'm far from being convinced that he has a sane technical
judgment to be made a full uploading DD. He probably is able to maintain
(simple) packages but given that I have serious doubts on his technical
judgment, I would not like to see him having archive-wide unsupervised
uploads rights.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2010/12/msg00952.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/871undw15g.fsf@deep-thought.43-1.org

All in all, I think he's already at the right place in the spectrum of
possible ways to contribute to Debian. He does a lot of polishing, trivial
bug fixing and has probably helped many maintainers to update their
packaging or to fix RC bugs while they were MIA.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

Get the Debian Administrator's Handbook:
→ http://debian-handbook.info/get/

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