On 26/03/24 00:26, Nilesh Patra wrote:
I completely agree with you. We definitely have shortage of volunteers for different teams.It is no secret that most (probably all?) teams (delegated and otherwise packaging/developer teams) in Debian struggle with limited developer time and almost everything in Debian needs help. In quite a few teams that I've seen and also been a part of, there are only 3-4 people sharing a bulk of workload, sometimes it is even worse and there are 1-person teams too -- teammetrics stats can shed some light on it[1].
This imbalance can lead to exhaustion, burnouts, et. al. and having a low bus factor also poses an issue for stale packages/development in the corresponding teams when the people doing a lot of work there become busy with RL and can't dedicate much time.Do you have any plans to address this or any strategies so the workload could be somewhat better managed making this sustainable? (I know outreach to get new people onboard is one option but I'm looking for more opinions/points here.)
To be honest, I do not have any solid plan or strategy to deal with this issue. The lack of volunteers to take up tasks is not just an issue with Debian, but is common in other free software groups or any volunteer based groups.
As a DPL, one thing I plan to do is review the delegated teams and talk to them to know if they are understaffed and/or overloaded and address the issue appropriately. Also, I would be interested to hear from Debianites if they have some interesting suggestions.
Another thing I have in mind is to interact and learn from other free software/volunteer groups how they are coping up with this bandwidth issue.
[1]:https://wiki.debian.org/Teammetrics/API PS: While this question is for DPL candidates, anyone is free to chime in. Best, Nilesh
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