(M-F-T set.) [Frans Jessop] > When somebody wants to become a DD he is told ?Go find a package to > maintain, one that you can be the maintainer for.? I see serious > problems with this approach as Debian increases in DD's. I will how > this is in a second. What I think should be emphasized is ?Go find a > package team and join it and contribute and show your stuff.?
The point of maintaining a package is to prove that you *can* maintain a package. Being on a team proves nothing. Being on a team and doing most of the work proves something, if this can be measured, but that's difficult. As it happens, I'm on at least one team where I do a majority of the work, and at least one team in name only (haven't yet done *any* work). I don't particularly expect to be judged favorably for the one or unfavorably for the other, because it's just too hard to get the data. > I think Debian needs to emphasize teams packaging, not just > individuals for many reasons. We've had this conversation already. So I'll skip it. Besides, there are lots of things we need to emphasise in Debian. We've had those conversations, too. > Future A: > > There are now 10,000 DD's and over 100,000 packages, most nobody > uses, they are just there because they were needed by people who > wanted to become DD's. Obvious solution: Change the requirement from "maintain a package" to "maintain a package that a significant number of people care about". Since AMs / DAMs are people rather than machines, we don't need an accurate automated metric for this - something as vague as popcon should be quite sufficient to reveal the difference between useful packages and pet packages only ever installed by people who said to themselves "hmmm I wonder what this does" and then never bothered to uninstall them.
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