New package maintainer application questions.
My apologies if this question is misdirected.
The most recent issue of Debian Weely News (Sep 17) carries a brief
summary of lists of thing to do for Debian. The wnpp list, in
particular, inspired me to try to find out, once again, what is required
to attend to this particular call for assistance. I have often thought I
was qualified to help, but had thought it seemed to be a bit of a chore
to be allowed to.
I have a heap of packages that I maintain for my own purposes. I use
them for the usual variety of reasons, including, having a package owner
for as many files as possible on my system to make it easier to clean up
and keep up to date, establishing dependancies on libraries otherwise
used only by local programs and mistaken as unneeded orphans, and having
locally compiled programs upgrade automatically when they finally do
make it into, or upgrade in, debian.
A few of these packages appear in the request to package list, including
knoda and hk_classes. Others are mostly simple little tools: cddump,
kdirstat ... or fluff: gmandel, krosseye,...
I dug around a little in the Debian site, and in particular in the New
Maintainers' Corner, though I confess not exhaustively, to find out
where to direct packages or offers to help and it seemed to me that
in every case contributing required being an official debian developer,
and this in turn required, in part, just to start, a sponser that it
already a developer.
Is being a developer, in fact, required? I am perfectly willing to apply
and do the work as I already keep these particular packages up to date
for my own use, but I thought there might some easier short circuit
route such as forwarding packages to an existing developer who be the
official maintainer and who would forward packages to the archive with
his authority after reviewing them. If I must be a developer how do I
attract a sponser? I am the only one I know who uses linux, let alone
debian, and I am not in any user groups or online clubs or anything like
them. In short, I don't know any Debian Developers and certainly none
know me.
Thanks for any answers or direction toward more appropriate places to
ask.
Mike Schacht
mschacht@alumni.washington.edu
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