On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 00:24, Adrian Bunk wrote: > Most of us who work for Debian do this in our spare time. But I do > personally disagree with the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything" > argument I heard in several discussions. These were discussions about > things where some work of the maintainer who is responsible for his > package would save work for other people who do volunteer work for Debian > or to improve the general quality of Debian for our users.
I agree. After all, it's voluntary to volunteer. But it should be very clear what is expected of you, and what you are willing to contribute. At the moment, much is expected, but the willingness can only be observed afterwards, day by day. Recent discussions on this and other lists are showing signs of the debian (and possibly the free software) community wanting to change the way development is done. Where before we had chaos and charismatic people hacking away into the night, we now have people striving for orderly development of mature systems. It is time not only to become hackers of code, but also hackers of project management, hackers of quality assurance and hackers of user interfaces. But fresh ideas require new participants - only it has become so much more difficult to get involved. Not only do you have to possess almost cs major skills to keep up, the debian project is so large that it is very difficult for a prospect maintainer to grasp the whole picture and find her own place. I sense countless lurkers reading this list and others, trying to get a glimpse of what debian is all about, and if it's something to get involved in. I count myself as one of them. Think of it as getting a job at a very large company. What if you knew nothing of the people working around you, nothing of the internal structure of the company, nothing of what you are expected to do? There are many able programmers and would-be-maintainers that cannot find a place to start. What the people writing about this matter seem to be after is - what is expected of a maintainer? - how does the debian project fit together? - what can I do? - what must I know to be able to do this? - where do I go to ask if I must know something? I think the real "debian problem" is not about maintainers MIA, orphaned packages or slow release cycles. The real problem is about lack of smooth introduction of new participants, and a complicated, undocumented internal structure. It is about unclear goals - what is the target audience or audiences of debian? If these matters were clear, more people would concentrate on writing missing documentation (where is the "debian system administrators guide" or the "debian desktop user's guide"?) finding MIA maintainers, fixing RC bugs, figuring out what "roles" the debian system can play and see to it that it does a good job on each. I have no answers, and I have no suggestions at this moment for the above - because I don't know what's expected, or where to start. fabbe