On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 10:34:07PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > Is there anything that those of us who are not these two people can do > to help with this, short of not bothering them about it?
I'm not sure where the "two people" figure comes from; I assume it's supposed to be referring to James and Ryan, but I can't see any obvious reason why Joey, Bdale or Lamont wouldn't have the experience too, or why they'd not be able to get access if they asked. OTOH, I can't imagine any of them having huge amounts of time free either. Anyway; the easy solution to not knowing how to help the people who can do it already is just to do it all yourself. Create a website (people.debian.org/~you, eg), write some scripts, and start uploading to that. The main reason offers of help don't work, is that the vast majority of them don't actually get followed through, so it just ends up wasting time setting up access permissions, and teaching the newbie how things works -- doing the work /first/ is the obvious way of demonstrating that the offer will actually get followed up; and it's a far better predictor than looking at who the person is, or what they've done for other projects, too, eg. The "do it all yourself" approach also works in case the people who you were going to help don't get around to doing anything, for whatever reason. Eg, Guy Maor was going to do a lot of the archive work needed to get "testing" happening at one point; but instead ended up reducing his involvement in Debian and not really doing anything; likewise, testing had been running for about a year before Jason and James started doing much about changing the archive so that it could be integrated. Note that doing stuff on your own doesn't offer any guarantees that it won't be a complete waste of time; Drake Diedrich [0] did an implementation of pools way back in 2000 that pretty much disappeared into the aether. (I happen to think some good ideas from it got pulled into dak/katie; but others' mileage probably varies) Cheers, aj [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-pool/2000/08/msg00002.html -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``[S]exual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.'' -- US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (http://tinyurl.com/3kwod)
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