Re: On terminology

[George Danchev <danchev@spnet.net>]

Jan Dittberner writes:
> On Mon, Jul 05, 2010 at 02:57:12PM +0200, Ludovico Cavedon wrote:
> > On 07/02/2010 11:14 PM, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
> > >Am I the only one who has trouble -and getting laughed at- whenever I
> > >try to explain these to potential contributors?
> > >
> > >Can we _at least_ rename the NM process to be indicative of what it is?
> > 
> > It also took me some time to figure out correct meaning of the
> > terminology. In particular the fact the fact that the "New
> > Maintainer" process is *not* the process that leads you to become a
> > "Debian Maintainer".
> 
> What is even more confusing is that we have a document called "New
> Maintainer's guide" [1] that is not meant to be a guide for new Debian
> Maintainers or people in the New Maintainers (NM) process, but for new
> Package Maintainers.
> 
> [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/

Fair enough, but renaming "New Maintainer's guide" to "New Package 
Maintainer's guide" or whatever would be too much of hardly warranted hassle, 
and I doubt it would thoroughly clean the confusion in terms. 

I'd rather stress on a distinction based on role names themselves, when 
correlating roles to documents (it necessary at all), and the following pun 
would nicely apply, IMO (also assuming the sequence of roles: DM->DD):

Debian *Maintainer* -> "New *Maintainer*'s guide" - i.e. New people to Debian, 
who are likely to be in need some guidance, indeed.

Debian *Developer*  -> "Debian *Developer*'s Reference" - i.e. they just refer 
to the docs (they are supposed to know by heart;-)

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB <people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu>