My apologies if this question is misdirected. The most recent issue of Debian Weely News (Sep 17) carries a brief summary of lists of thing to do for Debian. The wnpp list, in particular, inspired me to try to find out, once again, what is required to attend to this particular call for assistance. I have often thought I was qualified to help, but had thought it seemed to be a bit of a chore to be allowed to.
I have a heap of packages that I maintain for my own purposes. I use them for the usual variety of reasons, including, having a package owner for as many files as possible on my system to make it easier to clean up and keep up to date, establishing dependancies on libraries otherwise used only by local programs and mistaken as unneeded orphans, and having locally compiled programs upgrade automatically when they finally do make it into, or upgrade in, debian. A few of these packages appear in the request to package list, including knoda and hk_classes. Others are mostly simple little tools: cddump, kdirstat ... or fluff: gmandel, krosseye,... I dug around a little in the Debian site, and in particular in the New Maintainers' Corner, though I confess not exhaustively, to find out where to direct packages or offers to help and it seemed to me that in every case contributing required being an official debian developer, and this in turn required, in part, just to start, a sponser that it already a developer. Is being a developer, in fact, required? I am perfectly willing to apply and do the work as I already keep these particular packages up to date for my own use, but I thought there might some easier short circuit route such as forwarding packages to an existing developer who be the official maintainer and who would forward packages to the archive with his authority after reviewing them. If I must be a developer how do I attract a sponser? I am the only one I know who uses linux, let alone debian, and I am not in any user groups or online clubs or anything like them. In short, I don't know any Debian Developers and certainly none know me. Thanks for any answers or direction toward more appropriate places to ask. Mike Schacht [EMAIL PROTECTED]
