If anyone is interested, I'd like to offer my perspective here as someone who was, and still is, really quite enthusiastic about helping Debian, but hasn't really found a way to do so yet.
Sorry, but it turned into a bit of an essay when I wasn't looking. Let me just disclaim, too: I'm trying to outline what I see as things that might discourage a newcomer, something which is by its nature is going to come off as sounding negative. They haven't put *me* off, so don't take this as a whinge. I can still make these observations, and maybe people will find them useful. (Yes, some of them have been answered on this thread already. Some of them have answers buried in the wiki. But they're what I saw as the biggest sticking points.) -------- 1. If you want new contributors to join a team, you should tell them to join a team when they're most eager. There is an extra level of indirection underneath the Debian Mentors' list, but it's implicit and invisible — I'm talking about the fact that the acceptance of a new package depends on what team your new package will fall under. The acceptance or ignorance of RFSs might seem very arbitrary to a newcomer, not at all related to quality of work, and this can be more discouraging than people might think. It's human nature to be put off when someone doesn't tell you all the rules, and people do just give up. This could be fixed without any infrastructure changes whatsoever, just by making this layer more visible. In other words, if someone posts a good looking RFS, and it falls within the domain of an understaffed team, reply with a stock-standard email along the lines of: "Hi, thanks for your RFS, it looks like your contribution would be within the area of the [whatever] team. We'd really rather have more help with many packages already in the archives, please consider joining the team and helping out." Also: make it the *first sentence* in every document pitched at newcomers, rather than the harsh response given when they ask why their RFS was ignored after several weeks ;) 2. You have the NM guide saying that new users should post an RFS on the list and wait patiently, but then you have DDs saying "I never take an RFS off the list, I always go via IRC." You have the mentors.d.n which seems quite useful, but some DDs say no-one really uses it, so why have it? Except that other DDs say they only sponsor packages uploaded to mentors.d.n. This conflates #1. Your potential new helpers just get ignored instead of directed into more useful avenues. 3. So say I still want to help out. I love the neurotic pedantry of packaging, so I found a smallish package that is a release or two behind upstream. This takes more than a patch to fix, so I get in touch with the maintainer (there are no signs it is O or UFA). No response. I go to the trouble of packaging the new upstream while I wait, which incidentally fixes some bugs. I put the results up somewhere and contact the maintainer again. No response. Is he on holiday? Would an email to the Debian GNOME team be overzealous or inflammatory? Do I wait two or three weeks? There's an MIA procedure... somewhere... but is that for this kind of thing? Yet? I bring this up because it's a bit of a circle: you want people to help out with existing packages, but just like making a new package, they're liable to be ignored under certain all-too-common circumstances; in fact, under the very circumstances you're talking about being a problem. It's a paradox. Chaos wins again. 4. What exactly, do you mean by "join a team"? -------- Anyway, just my $20.50. Regards, Jason Heeris -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
