Bill Allombert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My own opinion is that if an applicant is doing a sizable job in Debian > already, they should be exempted of much of T&S. They have shown the > skill to do the work they are more likely to do anyway, and they will > have time to learn new skills as they need them. That might speed up the > process a bit.
(I don't know how you define sizable, but anyway:) I think the NM process is also something that the applicant can profit from a lot. When I became a DD, I had already been involved in teTeX packaging for quite a while, and there were some uploads that contained mainly changes made by me. I tried to make the packages both more policy-compliant and more user-friendly with respect to conf(iguration) file handling, I addressed licensing issues, etc. When you had asked me before the NM process, I'd probably have thought that I already knew most of the things important for handling teTeX. However, I did learn a lot both in the T&S and P&P (philosophy and procedures, or what's the name) part of the process, most importantly about library handling (which became important with the libkpathsea3->4 transition), evaluating licenses (which is important now, see the several bugs on the tetex-base source package) and internal structure of a binary package (knowledge which I seem to use every week). Not that I couldn't have learned that also later, when I really needed it. But the NM process was in fact a good opportunity to learn it right, get immediate feedback on my achievements (and not via the BTS...), and to take it serious. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
