> please be careful in your efforts to make contributing easier to not alienate > those who already contribute, sometimes for decades. also: it's rather easy to > kill motivation but very hard to revive it, once killed.
The above got quoted in the latest LWN, so it may be a sign that the above view has a lot of support. I am by far no longer "new" myself, but I mentor many who are new, and to me it looks like we are definitely alienating new contributors way more than old. I would like to argue, that the opposite of Holger's quote holds true as well: If those who have been contributing for multiple decades continue to ignore new tools and refuse to adopt workflows invented in past 20 years, it will totally kill the motivation for a lot of talented and industrious new contributors. For example, Michael Stapelberg was very active in Debian in 2009-2019 until he "had enough". His retirement blog post [1] from 2019 raises the many of the same issues we have been talking (yet again) on this very debian-devel@ list in past weeks (e.g. some people refusing to host their packages in git and on a common platform, bugs.debian.org being too cumbersome to use via email only, project-wide changes being too hard to drive etc). Ideally, I'd like to see both the old guard spend some time on re-assessing their workflows and adopting new ones, AND have new be humble enough to learning about Debian history and the multitude of different package types we need to support and why some tooling might not universally work for good reasons. This is one of the reasons I like the DEP process: unlike the policy, it does not enforce anything, but it still provides a way to define shared and common workflows and interfaces to make collaboration more efficient. The best outcome would be for both old and new contributors to feel welcome. Hopefully all the recent work in documentation and DEPs can lead to a good balance of revival without loosing things that are good already. [1] https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/