"Margarita Manterola" <margamanterola@gmail.com> writes:
> On 4/11/06, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt <marc@marcbrockschmidt.de> wrote:
>> 2.1 Multiple advocates
>> ----------------------
> I agree with the rest of the suggestions, but I'm not sure that I
> agree with this one... I can think of two cases where this could be
> an unnecessary problem to someone who does actually contribute:
>
> 1) Someone who maintains a certain number of packages, but they are
> all sponsored by the same person. This person might be doing a lot of
> work, and be knowledgeable about Debian without interacting actively
> with anyone else apart from his/her sponsor...
Well, it's quite unusual to do this - and not necessarily a good
idea. Debian is not only a technical project, but also a community, a
social network. It's important to be actually a member of this group,
especially when it comes to voting. Also, I think this is quite unusual,
while the number of "bad" advocates [1] is bigger. I'm certainly willing
to drop this requirement for special cases (*really* special cases), but
for average applicants, this is certainly something that will immediatly
help.
> 2) Someone who does not have a fixed sponsor, but sends mails to
> -mentors asking for uploads whenever they need one. This person's
> work won't be appreciated by all of his/her sponsors, because they'd
> only see one of those packages, and not all the work done... (In this
> case, it's even difficult to get an advocate at all)
I strongly discourage this practice, as it multiplies the work of
sponsors. Sponsoring packages for the first time means a thorough
package check, which is a lot of work. After that, sponsoring becomes an
issue of doing a debdiff on the old and the new .dsc files and some of
the usual (pbuilder, piuparts, functionality) checks. Changing the
sponsor often means to multiply the initial work, which is certainly not
a good idea.
> Maybe we could ask for a more comprehensive advocation, that includes
> what contributions the applicant has made, and why would he/she be
> worthy of Debian.
We have done this for some time now, but we still have "weird"
advocation messages - for example, there were three applicants with the
same (!) advocation message in the queue a few weeks ago. That
advocation message essentially said "I've met them at a conference once,
they seemed nice and interested and there are no DDs in $country yet, so
I'm advocating them".
Marc
Footnotes:
[1] "bad" not meaning that they're a bad DD, but that they advocate
prospective applicants to early, in conflict with the goals of the
advocation.
--
BOFH #2:
solar flares
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