On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 12:41:35PM +0100, Anthony Towns wrote: > The Debian Project endorses the concept of "Debian Maintainers" with > limited access, and resolves that: [...] So one thing that I wrote about originally [0], that I don't think I've repeated much, is that ultimately I look at this as more closely related to the idea of "sponsorship" than "new-maintainer". Ultimately, I hope that the DM concept gets implemented and works well enough to be a replacement for the practice of sponsorship -- or at least long-term or ongoing sponsorship -- as currently exists in Debian, rather than as a replacement or workaround for new-maintainer. So that new-maintainer keeps existing (and hopefully provides more value for the time it takes up, whether that means increasing the value or decreasing the time or both), and sponsorship keeps happening, but via the DM process instead of the current one, so that "sponsored" maintainers become identifiable to Debian (through the new keyring), become a bit better known or knowable (through the advocacy mails they need to become a DM) and thanks to both those aspects can be more trusted and effective (in the form of being able to directly upload their package(s) to the archive). Of course, it's not that simple to distinguish sponsorship and new-maintainer as they currently stand, since sponsorship itself is in some ways a workaround for problems in new-maintainer, but I think it's become quite a bit more than just that -- ie, if we could make new-maintainer be "perfect" right now, I don't think we'd actually want to get rid of sponsorship; perhaps because we want to use it as a part of new-maintainer, or because we want to accept contributions of people who don't want to be DDs, or because we want to raise the bar in being a DD to a higher level than we need for people to contribute to a few packages. I guess one of the things that leads me to think this -- after having spent quite a long time considering sponsorship a horrible hack that needs to die asap -- is the different interpretations that people take when talking about "fixing" new-maintainer. Some folks interpret it as "making it easy to pass, so we have lots of DDs even if they only have the skills to maintain a few easy packages", while others think new-maintainer's already being too lax and letting people into the keyring who simply haven't been exposed to enough aspects of Debian and don't have a deep enough understanding of various topics to actually warrant being a DD. To me, it seems like we're going to have to resolve that ambiguity in what it means to "fix" new-maintainer before we're going to have much hope of actually "fixing" it. And I guess that's where I come back to DM at least -- we already have the concept of a non-DD maintainer of a package in the form of sponsorship, so making that official and supported and effective seems like a good way to start working out what a good compromise for the various ideas on what it means to be a "DD". Without some different way of contributing than being a DD or someone who sends patches to the BTS and hopes they're applied, I just don't see any way of resolving the different ideas on how much skill you need to have to contribute to Debian, and I definitely can't see us picking one set of views and proclaiming it's the one true path. I dunno, maybe that doesn't make all that much sense, and I don't really think it's terribly proscriptive or even descriptive of how the DM process will actually affect Debian in practice, but given the fairly intense focus on DM versus the new-maintainer process in the discussion so far, I thought trying to emphasise the comparison to sponsorship might be useful. FWIW, that's also more or less why my proposal doesn't go into any details on when the DM process should be used -- it's trying to be comparable to sponsorship, which is useful in lots of circumstances, so it's designed to enable higher level policies, not to set them, iyswim. Obviously, IMHO, YMMV, FWIW, IANAL, etc. Cheers, aj [0] http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/04/12#2006-04-11-maintainers
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