Do we still value contributions?
Hi,
I mean this post as a challenge, but not as blame. I know many teams do
hard work that can be thankless, and my intent is not to blame them, but
to challenge us as a project to question our processes and attitudes.
Here's what I mean:
On October 12, I uploaded glktermw, a new package. On October 19, I
uploaded nncp, also a new package. I have heard nothing at all about
either of them since, they remain in the NEW queue but even inquiries on
this have yielded nothing. In that time, NNCP has had several updates
and I packaged one of them, but finally I stopped bothering; I mean, if
it's just going to sit in NEW -- and perhaps even reduce the importance
of processing it (the NEW page now shows its age at 3 weeks, which is
the age of the second upload, not the original one) -- why should I?
Strangely, I also uploaded a package on October 12, glulxe. It was
accepted a month later, despite depending on glktermw, which was and is
still in NEW.
This situation makes me wonder: is it worth it putting in the effort to
package things up for Debian? At the moment, it seems the answer is no.
Let me add on to that. 17 years ago, I wrote pygopherd. It has been in
Debian since then. It's written in Python. The Python 2 removal
process, of course, is happening. (There is a maintained branch of
Python 2 out there, which makes this annoying, but I'm not volunteering
to maintain it, so I don't think I can complain.) I have been actively
working on porting pygopherd to python 3, but this process is extremely
difficult. 2to3 left many, many open issues. Python 3's improper
filename handling left more, and changes to standard libraries such as
zipfile that removed features that the code relied upon introduce yet
more. I am close, but the holidays are busy and I haven't had time to
hack on it.
pygopherd was removed from testing. That makes sense. But also from
sid, hours after I replied to the bug about this explaining that I was
actively working on a port and asking it not to be removed. It was
anyway. That doesn't make sense. My question now is: is it worth
bothering to finish the port? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
The only reason I was porting it was for Debian. It will now have to go
through NEW again, and it appears that getting things out of NEW is iffy
at best.
I also maintain some other Python programs which should be much easier
to port once pygopherd is done.
I don't know what's going on with NEW. Perhaps we as a project need to
reconsider how it works. Perhaps there are ways to improve
communication and visibility. At the moment, as far as I'm concerned,
NEW is a powerful disincentive to contribute to and participate in
Debian.
Along the same lines, removing working software from sid (while various
other non-working software remains there) is also a disincentive to
contributing to Debian.
My challenge to the project is to have some empathy for others. Are
these processes setting people up to succeed in producing a high-quality
distribution? Or are we erecting barriers in the way of this?
There have been a number of departures from Debian lately, saying
something along the lines of "it's not fun anymore." I am not a
departure. I have been a Debian Developer for something like 23 years
and still am. The flamewars are regrettable and sad, but don't
represent a decline over where we were 23 years ago.
The bureaucratic silence, however, is different. It really has me
questioning whether contributing to Debian is still worth it.
John
[1] https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
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