On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 02:37:14PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > > Rather than kicking out those developers who have added to the bloat of the > archive without taking responsibility for the long-term consequences of the > packages they've added? :) > > You appear to believe that adding people to the project will improve the > ratio of developers to packages. I do not; I expect it will cause the > number of packages to increase in proportion to the increase in developers, > because people choose to become developers to scratch *their own* itches > and those will frequently be different than the itches of those who came > before them and left behind orphaned packages. > > I do think a more limber NM process would benefit us in general, but I don't > see any reason to believe that more DDs == better packages. > You bring up an interesting point. It has sort of made me think of an idea which maybe can help to alleviate the problem you describe. How about requiring all new NM applicants to join an existing package maintenance team? By package maintenance team, I mean a team which lists themselves as the Maintainer in one or more packages. For example, the Perl group, or the Python group, or the Zope team, or whatever. Require that the applicant actively participate in teams activities, fixing bugs, improving existing packages and so on. This is not mean that they cannot add their own packages, rather that they need to focus at least part of their effort on improving the packages that are already in Debian. Another possibility is to require new applicants to adopt packages which are O, RFA or join someone as a co-maintainer or become a co-maintainer for a package that has an RFH out there. In the case of co-maintainership and joining a team, the "lead" maintainer, presumably an experienced DD, will be required to attest to the applicants participation in the group, etc. In any case, I think that there more than ample opportunities for joining teams or becoming a co-maintainer. It can be decided if such requirements are to be waived for applicants who are interested in doing primarily QA, documentation, translations, localization, internationalizations, and so on, since those are nearly always going to happen as improvements to things that are already in Debian. This may be totally off base, but I though I'd throw it out and see what discussion it generates. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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