Re: Developers vs Uploaders
cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) <cobaco@linux.be> writes:
> Well me for one:
> I've been actively involved with Debian for years (as a translator since
> march 2003, and as non-DD maintainer of 1 simple package since may 2005).
> Despite having been involved for years I still haven't bothered to go
> through the whole NM-process, and that's not because I think I can't pass
> it, but simply because I'm not looking forward to starting a long,
> drawn-out process (average time to complete NM is what? 6 months to a
> year?)
The thing about the long, drawn-out process is that if it is long and
drawn-out (which can vary somewhat), that's because you're waiting for
people to have time for you. It's not that you're doing something every
moment of that wait. So it's just a long-term investment.
That's the way I thought about it going in. To some degree, it's an
unintentional weeding factor. I'm not sure if it's something we really
should be weeding for, but it's at least arguable. NM measures whether
you have a long-term view of your Debian involvement and an expectation
that a year or two years from now, being involved in Debian is still
something that you want to do.
I found it fairly comfortable to start it in the background and just let
it run while I continued to do other things. I didn't find it
particularly painful because of that mindset shift.
It is true that maintaining a large set of sponsored packages is pretty
annoying. I was blessed by an excellent sponsor.
> Being a full DD grants AFAIK the following:
> - voting rights
> - access to debian machines
> - access to debian-private
> - being able to NMU any package
> - being able to introduce new packages without having to find a sponsor
> - debian email adres
> - (I also seem to recall something about subcriptions to... was it lwn?)
> that's a lot broader then "being able to upload new versions of a particular
> package"
The packaging areas are where the difference is the most notable. Voting
rights and access to debian-private are excellent ways to consume time,
but it's arguable the degree to which either is really a useful way to
spend time. Access to Debian systems is unfortunately somewhat less
useful than it ideally could be, for a variety of reasons.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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