Re: Community renewal and project obsolescence
On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 08:48:28AM -0800, Antonio Russo wrote:
> As someone who would like to participate more in the development of Debian, my personal
> experience is that making contributions is like dropping a message in a bottle into
> the sea. It feels like a complete crap-shot whether I'll even receive a comment on
> any code contribution (including debian-devel RFS, salsa MR, or BTS patch).
There are multiple reasons for that, some common to all of these, some
specific to some contribution types, but all ultimately boil down to other
people being volunteers. There is no direct way to improve this beyond
magically increasing the total amount of time spent by maintainers on
Debian work. Some processes or tools could be improved but I'm not sure
how much would that help.
> If there were a single thing that could be done, in my mind it would be to have someone
> make sure that contributions do not go entirely ignored. Even just telling someone "hey,
> none of the stuff you're submitting is really good enough for Debian" would be helpful
> because they could either work on improving, or stop trying to contribute.
There is no polite way to tell that, but also it's not a big problem for
the project if somebody who submits very bad RFSes gets those RFSes
ignored instead of being told to stop waiting for feedback on them.
Giving constructive feedback, on the other hand, can be very
time-draining, especially to first-time contributors submitting poor
quality things. This is not even specific to Debian but applies to any
open source maintainer work.
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