Re: volunteering
On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 11:13:27PM +0100, Siward de Groot wrote:
> Groucho Marx wrote:
> > I can also be useful on the quality asurance area. As you may gess, I'm
> > happy to spot little details that others ignore.
> > I checked the "more than two-year old bugs" page and offered to solve one
> > easy enought to my skills: to write a man page for koth.
> > Unfortunately, koth's manteniner (Eduard Bloch) never answered me.
> > Should I send him my proposed man page anyway?
The maintainer of koth is Adam Heath, not Eduard Bloch.
> There is always the chance that your email got overlooked or accidentally
> deleted,
> so i think you should try contacting him again,
> and if that doesnt produce result, you can mail to relevant list.
> If you put work into that manpage it would be a shame if it got wasted.
To quote (roughly) the guidelines for the #debian IRC channel, "Don't
ask to ask, just ask". Most Debian work is coordinated through the bug
tracking system; for the sort of thing you're talking about, if you
don't see it there, chances are it doesn't exist. If you'd like to write
a manual page for something, just write it and send it to the BTS, and
then somebody can add it to the package at any point in the future. If
you think duplicated work is likely, then mail a note to the bug saying
that you're working on it. No need to ask permission for that sort of
thing: if the maintainer knows of other efforts, he/she'll tell you.
The sad truth is that many people (myself included, from time to time)
volunteer for things and then run out of time to actually do them. It's
much easier to work with real contributions rather than offers of help,
welcome as they are.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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