On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 02:50:59PM +0100, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> So here's a proposal for the Debian Maintainers idea that's been floating
> around for some time now [0]. I've drafted it while lying in bed in
> the Budget Backpackers before wandering up to debconf, so it's just my
> take on things, and could probably do with some improvements. As nobody
> else has seen it 'til now, it shouldn't be taken as implicitly having
> anyone's support.
>
> I've used terms like "initial policy" quite a bit -- I figure it
> makes sense to do the reasonably small step of letting people maintain
> specific packages in the archive without being full developers, rather
> than trying to add in other goals "revamp the new-maintainer process"
> or "let non-DD contributors (eg translators) vote" at the same time.
>
> [0] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/04/12#2006-04-11-maintainers
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/04/msg00006.html
> http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/03/msg00074.html
Since the first proposal of that idea, and having talked about it with
many different people, I'm less sure that I like the idea.
I mean, as DDs we like the idea because it removes the itchy PITA to
deal with sponsorees that don't need us anymore. But it also suppress
the incentive to make NM better. I mean, it _is_ a PITA to have to
sponsor people with 50 packages that are perfectly wise enough to care
about them themselves. A PITA for the DD, but also for them who need to
wait for the sponsor most of the time.
NM is really better than what it was, I mean the time from the
advocacy stage to the am report is pretty good now (when it's long it's
often due to slow NM/AM pairs, and well, it's not the NM queue fault).
Though, the last bottleneck are the DAM review and account creation
stages. With DM, only the NM is really impeded by the slowness of this
last bit of the process, and it's likely that nobody will never work on
this bottleneck, because:
* NM's fear the wrath of DAM if they are too insistant ;
* DD's won't really care since those people won't be sponsored anymore
by them.
Another question I have is that basically, I don't grok why it's
harder to give DM's uploads rights, than NM's an account.
Well, basically I quite concur with Bastian on the fact that it'll
likely hide some current problem, and prevent us from fixing them. Is
there _that_ many people around there that need upload rights _and_
don't care about voting rights, reading -private, and so on ? I'm
worried with this kind of second class developers thing. I mean, as a
staging area maybe, but I don't like the fact that people could stay in
it for basically, forever.
I'd be more comfortable if we could somehow fix the NM problems
_before_ pushing that proposal. I mean, the proposal is sensible, but I
fear that after all it addresses the symptoms rather than the root of
the problems it's supposed to fix.
Cheers,
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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