Re: mentors for new maintainers

[Igor Grobman <igor@digicron.com>]

Fabrizio Polacco wrote: 
> Igor Grobman wrote:
> > 
> > The idea of "mentors" who would help new maintainers to get
> > acquainted with the project.  
> > 
> > This will eliminate most of the "newbie" questions on debian-devel. 
> > It also allows the newbie maintainer to ask the "stupid" questions
> > without being afraid to waste the bandwidth on a public list. 
> 
> The idea seems good, IMO.
> But, given the open nature of Debian, wouldn't this goal be achieved
> better creating a mailing list new-maintainers@lists.debian.org where
> all developers that have time can contribute to help questions from new
> maintainers, without annoying the others (who have less time and want to
> focus on development)?
> 
> IMHO this would be a simpler way to achieve the goal (which is to help
> new maintainers, and also to promote them to ask even faq questions,
> without the fear of being rtfm-ed, instead of waiting to learn from bugs
> received :-)
  > 
> A place where a new-maintainer can feel supported, where instead I see
> that debian-devel badly accepts those recurrent threads.

I like your idea, but I still think having individual mentor is better.  
Posting on a list (even a newbie-friendly list) is always a harder thing than 
sending a private email to a person who you know is glad to help you.  I, for 
one, always think twice before posting on a list, not wanting to sound stupid. 
On the other hand, for a private email, I don't care as much :-).  What I am 
trying to say is that the newbie maintainer might be more comfortable getting 
one-on-one help rather than posting on the newbie list.  


The problem with mento idea is the fact that I only got a single volunteer for 
it so far.  I believe we have many more qualified people here.  Come to think 
of it, if you've packaged a couple of packages, and hung out on the lists for 
3-4 months, you should be qualified.  It's not that hard of a job really.  
If you don't know the answer, you can always post to debian-devel :-). 

Volunteers?


-- 
Proudly running Debian Linux! Linux vs. Windows is a no-Win situation....
Igor Grobman           igor@debian.org                 igor@digicron.com 



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