Re: Tong Sun: Advocate
On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 1:07 PM Sergio Durigan Junior
<sergiodj@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, January 21 2021, Tong Sun wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 11:08 PM Sergio Durigan Junior
> > <sergiodj@debian.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sunday, January 17 2021, Utkarsh Gupta wrote:
> >>
> >> > For nm.debian.org, at 2021-01-17:
> >> > I support Tong Sun <suntong001@users.sourceforge.net>'s request to become Debian Developer, uploading.
> >> > I have worked with Tong Sun on a couple of golang packages for a couple of months now and I would
> >> > like him to be able to upload packages on his own.
> >>
> >> Hi Utkarsh, Tong,
> >>
> >> It seems to me, judging from outside (and without having actually seeing
> >> the work you've done) that you don't have too much experience working
> >> together. This can be problematic, especially if the work was done in
> >> private and in the context of a team collaboration, for example.
> >
> > Thanks for the positive criticism. May I know what is the problem
> > with/when the work was done in private please? And also what would the
> > problem be in the context of a team collaboration. That indeed has
> > been the case for most/all of the go packages that I worked with
> > Utkarsh.
>
> Sure. I see no problem working in private with a DD; I myself work with
> two other contributors who come to me in private asking for sponsorship.
> But I think that when you do that, you have to spend more time with the
> person in order to get to know him/her better. Working in public has
> the benefit that other people will see what you and your sponsor are
> doing/discussing, and will be able to chime in if needed. I would not
> feel comfortable advocating for someone who worked with me in private
> and on a couple of packages only.
Understand.
My view on this is that your sponsor does not owe you anything, thus I
will not ask technical questions in private to my sponsor only. Our
private conversations are more on logistic issues that are specified
to the very packages we are dealing with, *mostly*.
For all technical questions, I asked publicly and never bothered CC my
sponsors as I understand everyone is busy and I'm not relying on my
sponsors to answer technical questions for me. Thus even if you peek
into our private conversations, between all my sponsors actually, you
won't find much technical discussions actually. For example, the last
project that I worked with Utkarsh is the transition of libgit2
package. If you search for
"Verify the library transition"
in Debian Mentor mail archive, you would find that my technical
discussions are all conducted publicly. I have 16 messages in my mail
archive on it, sending back and forth. None of them is answered
(publicly) by Utkarsh, IIRC. people do be able to see what I and my
sponsor *would be* doing/discussing, and people did have chimed in the
discussion previously.
> As for the team collaboration, it may be more of a personal thing, but
> if I am advocating for someone to become a DD I like to see that he/she
> has the ability to work on a variety of packages. Working only with
> team-sponsored packages (and again, just a couple of packages, as
> mentioned by Utkarsh) does not reassure me that the person is fit to
> have access to the whole archive. But I understand that this is a
> personal view on the process.
I understand your concern. However, Utkarsh and I are not on the same
team at all. The only reason that I had been working with him is
exactly the same reason as your concern -- when I asked everyone who
had sponsored my before for advocate me for DD, Utkarsh is the only
one who was willing, and he had exact same concern as yours, basically
he said "1, I don't know you well, 2. we haven't collaborated much
yet". This is the only reason I'm on his team. I didn't know him
before he sponsored my first package. So from my point of view,
teaming up with him is no different than teaming up with other
sponsors I had before, or anyone. Moreover, Utkarsh and I had been
collaborating on not one, not two, but a bunch of packages together
before he OKed advocating for me.
Your team collaboration concern is a reasonable one, just that it
might not be 100% applicable to our case. Moreover, in case for those
people who don't have a rough idea how big the transition of libgit2
project is, this is a *heavily* trimmed down version of its reverse
build dependencies:
https://o1yhw.csb.app/
Many of the packages don't need the transition, but that doesn't mean
I didn't do the verification. There are so many things that have been
happening behind the scene, that I thought nobody would care. Thanks
for bringing it up, and giving me a chance to explain.
> Thank you,
>
> --
> Sergio
> GPG key ID: 237A 54B1 0287 28BF 00EF 31F4 D0EB 7628 65FC 5E36
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