Re: On the "Debian Maintainers" GR
On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 13:02 +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Friday 27 July 2007 12:22, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
> > As a subscriber to the debian-med list, I do not share your view of this.
> [...]
> > I therefore do not agree that your example is a valid one - rather, I think
> > teams/groups like debian-med are an excellent way to combine work of DD's
> > and non-DD's.
>
> Sure. But why shouldnt trusted non-DDs not be able to upload their teams
> packages? And a subscriber and active Debian Edu developer I think it would
> make complete sense and would be helpful, if certain non-DDs from our team
> (not all of them, but I have 2-3 in mind) could upload to Debian.
>
> DDs are busy, are not available (working, traveling, broken hardware,
> different timezones), and so on - why put more load on them without need?
I agree that some non-DD's simply deserve upload rights. I also agree
that some of those non-DD's waste time asking around for an upload. But
I also think that the Debian Project must be very careful with selecting
the people with upload rights, because an upload to Unstable is in fact
an immediate release to many systems using Debian Unstable and a 10 days
delayed release to all Debian Testing machines. This is not the case
with contributions in svn or cvs; no direct impact.
Another aspect if this debate about giving more people upload access
sooner, is that the more the Debian Project becomes a large community
based project, the less professional users (think large companies like
banks) want to trust the Debian Project as a decent and trustworthy
GNU/Linux distribution. Strict control of what gets shipped with Debian
with high quality standards is essential to compete with commercial
distros like Red Hat in the market of big users/customers.
Part of the debate about the NM queue and about giving upload rights to
non-DD's is in my opinion related with the way the Debian Project
rewards the non-DD contributions. I think that contributors actively
providing patches for bugs, do translations work, maintain website
contents, do package maintenance via svn or cvs, ..., or a combination
of these tasks, should be considered formally and officially worthy
"Debian contributors" or "Debian maintainers" or some other cool title.
Sponsors should congratulate new packagers for their first accepted
package with comments like "great, you're now an official Debian
packager, congratulations". The difference with full DD's should be
moved to the background so that less people desperately want to become
full DD, just to get the recognition of being a worthy contributor to
Debian.
So I think that I will probably vote "further discussion" for the GR. I
really worry about the quality of what gets uploaded to Unstable if
non-DD's get upload rights more easily. No offence meant to anyone in
particular ; I know that some non-DD's simply deserve upload rights.
Regards,
Bart Martens
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