Hello Jonathan, On Sat 30 Mar 2019 at 10:23AM +02, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> That leaves less than 10 packages that need reviewing right now. I do > think that reviewing/sponsoring should be a lot better, and that more > DDs should play their part, and that our tooling can improve to bring > more visibility to these requests, but I would classify this more as a > medium priority problem TBH... hmm, am I being pedantic about > classification of problems... I digress.. > > More packages moving to teams have been a great thing for Debian, I > think we should leverage that more for sponsorship requests. It would be > nice if a DD looked at their DDPO page and it would also show > outstanding sponsorship requests for the teams they're part of. It's > great that the DDPO pages now show outstanding merge requests from salsa > in the VCS column, I would've probably missed the few MRs I've received > so far if it wasn't for that. > > If a quarter of active DDs checked the RFS list / mentors.debian.net > just once a month and reviewed a package, there would probably be no > problem in terms of waiting to get a package sponsored whatsoever, I > think we could do more to advertise the todo list, maybe a weekly report > to debian-devel like the WNPP report may work well. If I may summarise, your response is to invite more DDs to spend time reviewing sponsorship requests, and improve tooling a bit to reduce the friction in doing that; in particular, by pointing team members to sponsorship requests for packages that either are or will be maintained under the umbrella of that team. As I said in the message to which you're replying, I am not convinced that any tooling improvements are going to change the state of play in this area. So, then, your response is to ask more people to spend time on it. The problem with that is that it ignores the good reasons people have for not spending time on it! If I have relevant expertise or experience to improve Debian in some particular respect (e.g. fixing bugs in a packages written in a particular programming language that isn't so commonly used), I have strong reason to use my time to deploy that expertise and experience, rather than review some sponsorship requests. The latter very rarely requires skills not possessed by all DDs. Such reasons are defeasible, such as if I just really feel like reviewing sponsorship requests, but I think it's at the heart of the problem. We *all* have particular things we can do better than most other DDs, so we have strong reason to work on those, not on something that all of us can do. -- Sean Whitton
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