On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 01:02:15PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > The sponsors who have enough time to make such silly claims should be > spending more time checking their sponsorees packages! I wonder if > some of them are sponsoring because they think NM is needlessly slow, > rather than because they want to do a proper education/mentoring task.
Well at first it is. One of my main sponsoree is Fathi[0]. I sponsor him for quite a long time now, I'd say a year at least. The beginning of our relationship was indeed really a teacher/student one. I reviewed his first packages with a lot of care, discussed with him many details, helped him to understand some debian packaging tricks, and so on. But for now something like 6 months, I've nothing to say wrt his packages. I merely do cosmetics remarks, he knows his stuff. He _is_ a goddamn very valuable Debian Contributor: very good packages, excellent senses of his responsibilities. Sadly, he is stuck in NM[1] because the process is a tad tedious, that he finds the whole process repulsive, and that I'm reliable enough to upload his packages in a timely fashion (those are guesses, he can correct me if I'm wrong). So for the last 6 month, my sponsoring work is mostly beeing a build and upload machine. That's quite a waste of my time (since my reviews have never triggered any valuable flaw), and of his (because he has to ask me for the reviews, wait for my answers, and cannot work as fast as he could because of that). Here, there is no way of fast-tracking him, because you know, fast-tracking is kept allot for prominent people, and ... well, I guess you never heard of him before. So he's stuck in NM, has no right to upload his packages alone, and NM is clearly inadequate for him, whereas he is skilled, knows how to limit himself, and only work on things he know he will able to cope with later, and knows when there is a thing he does not understand/controls correctly, and go ask questions to people that know, to avoid mistakes. His understanding of debian's philosophy is what we expect from NM's too. He's just ready. but no, he continues beeing my sponsoree, for the time being, and IMHO for still a long time, because he cares way much more about the quality of his packages, rather than having his @debian.org address. This kind of people is the kind of developers I would be glad to meet more often in our project, and we are completely unable to make them full DD in a decent amount of time. That's a shame. At least, with the "DM" proposal, he would not depend upon me anymore, except for the introduction of NEW packages. That would allow me to take new sponsoree, that would need the "teaching" part I quite like to do, and that Fathi no longer needs for months. > Sponsoring is probably something that needs more guidance. Each > sponsor has their own habits and there's little to say what's the > best. Personally, I think the sponsor should appear in Uploaders > @debian.org to be obvious if it goes wrong, but I think others > disagreed last time I wrote that. Well the sponsor already appears on DDPO, so it's not hidden. I'd rather create a Sponsor: field than an Uploader, or we need to rework Maintainer field. I mean, the current semantics is: Mantainer: <-- the person in charge (often an ML when it's a team) Uploaders: <-- the detailed list of co-maintainers or subset of the team really in charge of the package. I dont really see why a sponsor shall be in Uploaders, I sponsor a lot of package I never use, and I don't want to be in either of the fields. Though a Sponsor: field could be of use, yes. [0] http://qa.debian.org/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [1] https://nm.debian.org/nmstatus.php?email=fboudra%40free.fr -- ·O· Pierre Habouzit ··O [EMAIL PROTECTED] OOO http://www.madism.org
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