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Re: Question to all candidates: What are your technical goals



Hi,

Am Thu, Apr 04, 2024 at 09:55:33PM +0100 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 at 21:30, Salvo Tomaselli <tiposchi@tiscali.it> wrote:
> >
> > > In practical terms, it would probably be made easier if it was
> > > mandatory for all packages to be on Salsa, either in the 'debian'
> > > namespace or in a team namespace (but not under individual users).
> >
> > Realistically, even if you decide "everything is now team maintained", if
> > there is only 1 person who cares about a certain package there won't be any
> > team member doing anything about it.

This is perfectly true and I've seen quite a lot of team maintained
packages that are effectively touched by one team member only.  You
might like to compare the graphs of maintainer per package of Pkg Perl
team[1] where the majority of packages is maintained by 4-6 people, DPT
[2] where the majority of packages is maintained by 2-4 people and
Debian Science team[3] where we have de facto a single maintainership
per the majority of packages.

The differences are divers and need extra discussion.  Specifically you
can't compare specialised scientific software with general language
packages used in many dependencies.  However, I tend to think that the
difference between Pkg Perl and DPT are partly caused by the culture
inside the team.  In three teams I was involved we basically forked Pkg
Perl policy which was wide open to team wide changes.  In contrast to
this the DPT policy had some de-facto non-team option and it caused some
friction (to say it extremely short) to drop this[4].

What I want to say is:  The pure *option* to have more than one
person touching a package makes quite a difference.  For sure its
no guarantie that this will happen.  (And I'm really curious what
will happen in Pkg R team if I might stop my work there for one
year[5].

> > So having it on salsa or whatever won't
> > really do much, besides being annoying for people who have to change their
> > workflow for no reason.
> 
> Sure, but this is in the context of project-wide changes discussed above.

This argument is even stronger innfavour of team maintenance.  Beeing
asked about technical lead here:  We are possibly lagging even more in
maintenance way behind other organisations.  Using Git should be default
these days.  Changing the workflow to point to Salsa instead to
somewhere else should be not that dramatically annoying for everybody
given there are good reasons to do so.

> > Also let's not forget that it is expected for people who are not DD to
> > contribute to debian, and they can only create repositories on salsa under
> > their own name (for good reason, mostly).
> 
> Such contributors need a DD sponsor, which means access can be granted
> to individual repositories.

ACK.

Kind regards
    Andreas.

[1] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/maintainer_per_package_pkg-perl.png 
[2] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/maintainer_per_package_python-team.png
[3] http://blends.debian.net/liststats/maintainer_per_package_debian-science.png
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2024/02/msg00052.html
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-r/2024/03/msg00000.html

-- 
https://fam-tille.de


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