On 2023-12-29 20:13, Andrey Rakhmatullin 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.
Packaging has become simpler but the processes are going in the other direction. At the end, packaging is still time consuming, more than it should be. For example, we still need to upload binary packages for review, then source-only packages after the review. It is also "easy" for a single person to put a lot of work on many (MBF in a condition that was never used by anyone in the past 5 years, addition/promotion of a Lintian tag).
I would be curious to know the figures for Fedora. Their versioned sources are all at a single location, using a single VCS. Another point of comparison is Nix/NixOS. Despite the use of a very obscure language, it is easier to package and contribute (but they rely on GitHub), and it shows as they have far more packages than us.
Several times, the project confirmed it prefers the current situation to any possible improvement on that front. Some aspects are locked by teams nobody wants to upset (this is a volunteer project and if you are not ready to take the work, it is of bad taste to criticize). It is no surprise that younger people find contributing to Debian difficult and not worth of their time.
A still very current summary of the problems we have: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/Unlike Michael, I don't intend to step down, but I have wound down my involvement to a few key packages, so I share the responsibility of making Debian unattractive to new comers by being unresponsive.