Re: Developer / maintainer /member
On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 11:41:41PM +0000, Martin WHEELER wrote:
> - Debian developer
This is how we call official members of the Debian Project.
> - Debian maintainer
This is how people that maintain packages in Debian are often called.
The majority of maintainers are developers (and those who aren't are en
route to become developers), but not all developers are maintainers.
There are developers who at one point used to maintain packages, but later
switched to working in the infrastructure (a minority), or those who used to
maintain package and later switched to doing nothing (a majority). :)
The word maintainer is usually applied to packages, but you could possibly
become a maintainer of something else.
> - member of Debian project (SPI member?)
SPI is an "umbrella" organization that was created in order to handle money
and legal stuff for Debian.
> In fact, I already 'maintain' a HOWTO for the LDP (does this make me a
> maintainer? if so, who for?);
You're one of the upstream maintainers of the doc-linux-* packages, I guess :)
> So, my question is -- in what way does becoming a maintainer differ
> from going through the developer process?
If you join the new-maintainer process to become a document maintainer or
something like that, you would go through the same five steps the (program)
package maintainers did[1]:
* Step 1: Initial Contact
* Step 2: Identification
* Step 3: Philosophy and Procedures
* Step 4: Tasks and Skills
* Step 5: Evaluation and Check-in
However, your step 4 would not be about packaging but about documenting.
I'm not exactly sure if we've had anyone successfully do this, but I do
remember several attempts. Someone from the NM FrontDesk would probably know
more, Cc:ed...
[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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