Hey there Clint!
I'm here because I'm a full-time Perl developer and Debian
user in my day-job and want to become a more active part of
the community behind the technologies that I use and rely on.
I adopted liberror-perl a couple of years but have done
little with it, partly because the sponsor I was working with
gradually lost interest and became unavailable. Also partly
because an application I made to the New Maintainer process
was knocked back (after 8 months) because I "should probably
do some more work". That felt like a kick in the teeth at the
time, but I'm over it now and keen to follow that (very
reasonable) direction.
I know the feeling, I went through the same experience. The irony is
that now I am doing much more work for debian than I was about two
years
ago when I applied to be a NM and I don't feel any pressing need to
be a
DD. One can contribute a great deal to debian without being a DD. I am
not sure if you have read about the new DM process, there are a couple
threads about it on this list from the last two weeks - it might be
something you could check out, I have been mulling it over but at the
moment I don't see any specific advantage over the way I work now.
With the help of a new sponsor I've recently closed a couple
of bugs that had accumulated against liberror-perl, including
an upstream version upgrade. I now want to look towards
bringing the package under the co-maintainership of the
group, continuing to work on it, and seeing what other
packages I can help out with.
As gregor said, there is always lots to do, and IRC and the mailing
list
are pretty active. People tend to gather later in the afternoon on IRC
during Central European Time, Universal Time -1 hour. I start my
debian
activity by looking at the qa report which is a good overview, here is
the link again in case you don't have it:
http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/qareport.cgi