possibly exhausted ftp-masters (Re: Do we still value contributions?
Hi,
Some personal opinions as one of the current batch of FTP trainees.
* The ftp team might be in a (somewhat) negative loop from the
sustainable development aspect.
Let's first list a couple of facts:
(0) There are a small group of DDs working as ftp-master. Their time and
energy are limited.
(1) ftp-master is doing hard work, reviewing NEW packages, processing
RM bugs, maintaining dak, and recruiting new members to expand the team.
All of these are not trivial things.
(0)+(1) means that: the time that FTP spend on recruiting is quite
limited. Then how "limited" is it?
+ I seriously explained about the slow NEW queue process 2 years ago.
+ I joined the ftp team as trainee about 1 year ago, after 6 months
since sending out the application mail.
+ the preliminary assessment of the current batch of trainee is still
not available.
^ My (possibly biased) experience shows that the recruitment process is
quite slow.
What concerns me most is, what if the FTP team's "quit rate" gets larger
than "expansion rate"? You know what it means from a long-term
perspective.
---
However, accelerating the recruitment process of ftp team looks quite
difficult to all participants, including the ftp-masters and the trainees:
ftp-master:
* time and energy is limited. doesn't have enough resource to provide
too much feedbacks to the trainee
* wants to make sure every new member will be qualified enough to take
this important role.
trainee:
* limited time and energy. generally not able to produce a large amount
of reviews to the NEW packages in a short period of time
* lacks feed back. they don't know how are they actually doing in
reviewing the NEW packages.
So accelerating the recruitment process is not easy, given that we will
not lower our quality standards.
---
I think Sean shares some similar feelings.
FTP team shouts for help, and the team seems too "exhausted" to even
accept help ...
I respect all my fellow developers and their endeavor. In this mail
I'm simply describing the fact I saw.
On Wed, Dec 25, 2019 at 11:45:28PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> On 2019/12/24 20:08, John Goerzen wrote:
> <snip>
> > But at the same time, I feel that the project as a whole isn't really
> > taking this problem very seriously.
>
> That is true, probably mostly because many people don't really
> understand that there is a problem. The NEW queue waits are tough, but
> there are also the following which are also often in serious need of
> attention:
>
> * Patches attached to bug reports
> * Request for sponsorships
> * Merge requests
>
> Energy put into all areas like that end up paying for itself because it
> helps energize and attract new contributors.
>
> I try to keep up with sponsorship backlogs (making good strides but
> can't really keep up), which at the same time adds load to the NEW queue
> (11 of my and sponsoree packages stuck in there right now), which I feel
> kind of bad for so I've been trying to join as an FTP team trainee too
> to help out there (which I should probably try to follow-up again but
> that's also been a bit frustrating).
>
> I think many will agree with you that we should do better in all those
> areas, especially the NEW queue, but change is difficult and in itself
> takes time. In a commercial setting it would probably be easier to
> create incentives to motivate staff to do more review kind of work, but
> I suppose in Debian it's seen as somewhat unglamorous work and we don't
> have many methods to incentivise contributors.
>
> In particular I think it's important to support events like bug
> squashing parties because it's one of the few things that we can do, and
> encourage things like patch reviews, sponsoring and NEW queue reviews at
> these events and maybe even thank all the people who participate in
> these on a monthly basis in bits from Debian so that maybe this work can
> be highlighted more as something that we do value and might encourage
> more people to get involved there.
>
> -Jonathan
>
> --
> ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
> ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
> ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
>
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