On Wed, Jun 04, 2025 at 10:47:35AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> Sorry, yes, Debian discussions around workflow are often frustrating
> because part of the discussion is usually at least a mild request
> for existing maintainers to change their current workflows, and when
> people feel overwhelmed, changing workflows often feels particularly
> draining. Sometimes we manage to steer the discussion away from
> existing maintainers changing how they currently do things towards
> creating recommended best practices for *new* maintainers, and those
> are often less fraught.
I've been on vacation, so I only came across this thread now.
I think the other reason why these discussions are a bit frustrating
is that there seems to be an implicit assumptions that all
contributions from newcomers *must* be good, and MR's must be reviewed
ASAP or it's an indication that the project or package is moribund.
Sometimes code contributions are just bad quality. They might
introduce bugs; or they might make the code unmaintable; or in the
case of Debian packaging, the patch might be better sent upstream for
evaluation.
And of course, there is always the case of the xz-utils backdoor,
where the maintainer was bullied into letting a fresh-faced
contributor "help", and that person ended ended up being a bad actor
(perhaps from state-funded intelligence agency, such as the MSS, NSA
or KGB).
For critical code, if you don't have time, and the code quality is
suspect, I don't think we should be shaming open source maintainers or
package maintainers that they have some obligation to respond in some
set time. Code quality is much more important than keeping newbies
happy; at least, that's my set of priorities.
- Ted
