Le jeudi 10 juin 2010, Mohammad Ebrahim Mohammadi Panah a écrit : > I feel like encouraged enough to become a DD. But when I see how > complicated is the process of getting a package sponsored, I'm afraid > of even thinking about the process of becoming a DD. Or is it just me? It is not just you. :-)
For the beginner's point of view, it looks like: * there are not enough DD with time to review all proposed packages; * to have more DD people have to apply; * applicants have to show their skills and motivation by… maintaining packages, which requires sponsorship. So this looks like a vicious cirle. In fact it is not as simple as this, because not all DD have time to sponsor people, and because the ease to get a sponsor greatly depends on the interest the package itself will generate. For instance, for two packages I maintain: * latexila, a GTK+-based IDE for LaTeX, that got sponsored in very few time; * dokuwiki, a PHP-based wiki, that I co-maintain with a DD that has almost no time to sponsor me and suggested me to find another sponsor: such a package (PHP, web application) seems to interest nobody. Failing to get sponsorship is very frustrating, because you make some work you find useful, and, because nobody validates it, it remains useless. I is even more frustrating when it consists in an update rather than a new package, and this update fixes bugs that do affect real users. Such a frustration make easy to find problems in the Debian management, so this point of view is not a neutral one. :-) However, I think it is easier to get sponsorship from a specific community, like a local or national Debian developpers group, or a topic-related group, for instance debian-science (for science-related packages). When such a group exists: for instance, debian-webapps seems almost dead, so their is no hope getting sponsorship from there. I think the conclusion should be: when you become a DD, do not forget how you began, and do sponsor people. -- Tanguy Ortolo
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