Hi All, So here I am on holiday and I'm thinking about Debian stuff. That is probably a real worry...
Anyway, I got to the internet cafe tonight to discover that I'm done with the P&P part of the NM process. So that's good news for me :) The way it worked was that about a month ago my application manager sent me a long list of about 30 questions on Debian Philosophy and Practises (P&P)to answer. They were similar to the questions in the templates [1] but not entirely the same. I'd already looked at the templates, so I had a good idea what to expect, and that was fine. My P&P questions started with the necessary stuff about understanding the Debian Social Contratct and the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) [1]. Then they moved on to some fairly difficult questions about licensing issues. Then there were a long string of questions about details of the normal Debian practises for things like handling bug reports, non-maintainer uploads, internationalisation of packages and so on. It took me a few hours on 3 or 4 successive nights to get all the answers to the questions done. It was quite hard and basically boring work, calling for much tracking down of details from the Developers Reference [3] and other reference information on the website. I was confused about a few details in some of the questions, so I asked a couple of Debian Developers that I know to give me a hint on where to find the relevant information, or to explain to me more clearly what the question was asking. When I was finished, I sent my answers back to my AM. I did not envy him one bit for having to read the pages and pages that I had written in my answers. But he evidently found the time over the next couple of weeks, and responded with some discussion of things I got wrong, or where my answers were correct but missed a detail. So I had to go over some of the material again. Apparently this is fairly normal, so I wasn't worried about it, though I can think of more amusing ways to spend an evening :) I think my AM is being pretty thorough - I could say obsessive, but I won't ;) - in his attention to detail with some of these things. No doubt I will later appreciate that is it's good for me to have had to reread the tricky license statements to find yet more things that were wrong with them, etc... In the end it seems my second set of answers closed all the holes in the first set, and I have now passed the P&P part of the NM process. It is still not scary :) (Actually it gets less scary the more familiar I am becoming with all this Debian stuff.) My impression is that the P&P stage is basically more boring than actually difficult. I guess that is probably unavoidable, and it's definitely a good way to get people to read lots of the available reference material. The most interesting thing I have learned about, that I didn't know much about before, is how localisation and internationalisation of packages is handled. I am glad to know more about that stuff. I appreciate very much the effort my AM is putting into being helpful and friendly - it really makes this process easier and more enjoyable than it would otherwise be. The next stages of my NM process are the Tasks and Skills questions, and dealing with my AM's review of my packages. I already have a set of T&S questions to answer, but I'm not going to look at them now, because, as I mentioned, I'm on holiday :) So I'm off to enjoy the wonders of Ancient Greece and quit thinking about Debian stuff... Helen :) PS. Anyone interested in the NM process should take a look in the New Maintainer's corner [4]. It's also worth being aware that there are lots of ways to become involved with Debian other than maintaining packages. Translators, document writers and other contributors are also wanted. 1. http://cvs.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/templates/?cvsroot=nm-templates 2. http://www.debian.org/social_contract 3. http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ 4. http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint ___________________________________________________________ Moving house? Beach bar in Thailand? New Wardrobe? Win £10k with Yahoo! Mail to make your dream a reality. Get Yahoo! Mail www.yahoo.co.uk/10k
