Quoting Gard Spreemann (2021-03-23 16:40:32) > > Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> writes: > > > Quoting Gard Spreemann (2021-03-23 16:18:10) > >> Is there a fundamental difference between paying someone to do > >> "non-fun administrative tasks" like accounting, and paying someone > >> to help out with orphaned/RFA'd packages (cf. Christian Kastner's > >> recent "How to motivate contributors to work on QA" question)? > >> > >> It seems to me, to some extent, that a package that is orphaned or > >> RFA'd is per definition "not fun enough" for a volunteer to work > >> on. > > > > Accounting is a mandatory activity regardless of its fun-factor. > > > > Seems backwards to to me to pay for keeping packages alive that we > > have lost interest in. > > That's a good point, I agree. What about packages that we have lost > interest in, but that our users very much have not? Admittedly, I have > no idea of what the cardinality of that intersection is. > > Or alternatively: are there hard-to-maintain packages that are highly > useful to users, but where there just isn't enough interest to > overcome a very high maintenance burden? Could paid work help offload > the maintainer of such packages (leaving them with more of the fun > parts and less of the non-fun ones)? Yes, paid work helps some maintainers - but that's the wrong question! The right question is if paid work helps Debian *and* does not at the same time disturb (other parts of) Debian too much. Next question is then how much is "too much" - I have no answer for that. If Debian paid for working on orphaned packages, then I would probably orphan some of the packages I now maintain as a volunteer, to then work on those same packages for pay. I would not consider that cheating: Some of "my" packages are genuinely less fun to maintain, and would certainly be *lesser* fun if knew that others were paid for doing similar tasks. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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