Re:%20Re: Debian Maintainers GR Proposal
> I do not think that this is a fair characterisation of what is required
> of
> being a DD. There's no requirement to read any list except
> debian-devel-announce, which has less than one post per day on average.
> There's no need to get involved in licensing discussions, except of
> course
> when they concern your packages.
Oh, really? Great. That is one of the part of NM that is of no interest
to me.
> As a maintianer your job is to keep your packages in shape. Going beyond
> that
> is fully optional, and many DD's make full use of that optionality.
Yes. So, the right solution if I want to help is:
- first I spend a lot of time proving that I'm skilled enough to read
crazy licenses in a language that is not mine
- then I spend another lot of time proving I'm skilled enough to package
complex stuff unrelated to my current skills (say python stuff, which
I know nothing about, or trying to have a library not breaking
everything in an upgrade)
- then I spend enother lot of time reading complex procedures about
voting and so on in Debian
- then I am granted the right to help fixing the bug I found a few
months ago
- and then I decide to use none of those skills, just because it was not
my goal to use those.
That is probably a good way to shape a young contributor begginning in
free software contributions. I would probably have done that, 15 years
ago. But nowadays, I'm involved in a lot of projects, some are of
importance, at least for me. Those involvments take 99% of my time, and
1% is just enough to fix broken stuff in Debian, not to go through NM
just to upload a fix or two every year.
> So the core problem here might just be a misconception of what is
> required to be a DD. That should be solvable.
I don't think so. In my mind, a DD is someone who knows about Debian as
I know about TeX. And I do not want to become a DD :-)
I'm not Debian-skilled enough to package KDE, or to package OpenOffice,
I cannot claim that I'm skilled enough to do NMU on anything. But I do
pretend that, on some very specific packages, I can show to a DD that I
did fix a broken stuff, and that he can trust me to maintain that
package which is poorly maintained.
I can help, since I have some knoledge, but I won't do it if it requires
me to drop some other involvment.
Those last years, when I did find something broken in Debian, I just
updated *my* computer to work properly, which is IMO stupid, since I can
have contributed that.
Regards,
Benjamin.
Reply to: