On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 11:42:59AM -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote: > On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:35:04 +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > > Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilb...@gmail.com> writes: > > > > > As someone who has attempted to go through the mentoring process, I > > > agree very much that it is rather depressing. > > > > How much of that is actually a problem, though? How much is an integral > > part of gaining humility as to the state of the packaging work, and the > > pain of learning new conventions and processes? > > The depressing part is that almost no one is interested in being a > mentor,
A state which isn't helped by the regular complaint that "there's nobody to sponsor my packageeeeeees!". When I *do* sponsor something, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get at least one (other) person e-mail me personally with an RFS that's never seen the light of day here, and it's pretty much always for something I'd never touch (for some reason, it seems I see a lot of Java packages that way). Neither state of affairs encourages me to sponsor anything. > so its almost impossible to get your work into Debian, which > makes the effort seem pointless. Because having a nice package you can use yourself or put on a website somewhere has *no* value at all, naturally. > Note that I've actually succeeded many > times, but I've also failed many times as well. And the failures are > all due to lack of an interested mentor, not due to package quality (a > bunch of my packages are on mentors.debian.net and lintian clean). Those are not the be-all and end-all gauges of quality. > I think that the efficiency of mentoring is the problem that needs to > be solved. That could possibly be improved by treating mentoring tasks > as bugs. It may also possibly be improved by treating mentoring as a > team task. I see the complaint that DDs choose not to mentor because > they end up stuck with unmaintained packages. Well, it would be less > of a burden if those were team maintained (make new mentees part of > those teams as well). Because packages that are unmaintained by a team that are indifferent are not any different, practially speaking, than those that are unmaintained by one person who is indifferent. > Maybe mentorship should be a team effort? Start > a new group of mentees every month that work together perhaps? Yeah, that's a great idea! We should setup a mailing list where they can get together and ask questions of each other and request someone to sponsor their packages! - Matt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20101004193022.ge32...@hezmatt.org
