Re: Debian Maintainers GR Proposal
On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, Joey Schulze wrote:
> Therefore I assume that the answer would be "zero", i.e. it's
> the same time involvement required to maintain a package for
> both a DD and a DM.
Sure. A given task is the same work for everybody (or almost).
> 1 It's a one time issue even if the time period involved can be quite
> long and
A package maintainer that can't upload during one or two years and who has
to chase sponsors indefinitely will end up demotivated and won't finish his
NM process. (It's not something which is true of everybody, but it's
certainly true for a significant part of small contributors)
> 2 Didn't you say that the DM thing is not meant as workaround about
> dificiencies in the NM process?
I did. IMO the length of the process of the NM is a feature not a bug. I
want DD to be reliable like they are. On the other hand, I want people
with less time to be able to contribute a bit nevertheless. You need to
compromise on other aspects to achieve this.
> The NM process after all is meant to help new maintainers become
> skilled maintainers of packages. If we want to get them maintain
> packages without going through NM we should not create a new stage
> but drop or restructure the NM process. IMHO
The NM process gives us more than just "skilled maintainer of their package".
It gives us:
- confidence that they are able to work on any part of Debian and not only
the packages that they did when they started NM
- confidence that they are sane and that we can trust their judgment when
they vote
- confidence that they are going to be long term contributors
- confidence that they know most of the details concerning all aspects of
Debian's internal working
> Or are DMs only allowed to maintain the packages they started with
> as long as they haven't become more complex so that they can't
> exceed their packaging skills?
Exactly. This is the whole point of this DM proposal. They are only
allowed to maintain the packages that they are able to maintain well
because a sponsor had the opportunity to verify that they correctly
handled those particular packages.
> I fear that the DM thingy is just invented to get more people maintain
> packages in Debian without becoming properly involved, eventually not
> giving the same care a normal DDviaNM would give and thus Debian ending
> up with a universe of broken packages. That's most certainly not what
> I would like Debian to become in the future.
I don't want this as well. I might be that DM maintained packages have a
higher turn-around than DD-maintained packages but it's difficult to guess
that by advance. Our QA checks are always done on the full archive,
whether the packages are maintained by a DD, a DM or an NM. So we'd
detect problems there as well as with other packages.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
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