Re: About Package Maintenance (was: Question to all candidates: What are your technical goals)
Hi Marc (2024.04.08_16:48:13_+0000)
> I have also noticed that the young people we manage to recruit are
> usually not interested too much in the boring gruntwork of maintaining
> important core packages (like adduser and sudo) but instead want to do
> "new" things. But, otoh, what would Debian be without sudo? Somebody
> needs to do that work as well.
To some degree, this is self-fulfilling. Most core packages have a
maintainer. Drive-by contributions in a bug or MR are likely to go
ignored for years. Newbies aren't going to get pulled into these
packages, easily.
Where core packages are up for adoption, they're probably pretty complex
and maybe not the best candidate for a new contributor. The best stuff
has probably already been adopted.
All of this leads to the position we are in, where new contributors best
road into the project is into teams. And the best way to get some
experience is packaging something new in a team.
I see one of the goals of promoting team maintenance as increasing the
pipeline of new contributors into the maintenance of core
infrastructure. Rather than having to wait for the current maintainers
to slowly fade away and salvage the result after years of problems.
Stefano
--
Stefano Rivera
http://tumbleweed.org.za/
+1 415 683 3272
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