Re: Volume on -devel
> Branden Robinson <branden@ecn.purdue.edu> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 17, 1999 at 01:40:10PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> > > The results: of 1596 postings, 1158 were from developers, 438 were not.
> > >
> > > These are the top posters amoung non-developers:
> > >
> > > 40 no: Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca>
> >
> > This guy's in my killfile anyway. He's either a troll or a moron, either
> > way he should go back to being an anonymous coward on slashdot.
>
> Er, um. Okay, I publically apologize FWIW. I'll shut up or even
> unsubscribe. FWIW, I sent in a developer application a while ago but
> obviously I'm not up to that.
Dear Navindra,
Please don't take one individual developer's rants seriously. I don't
know whether or not you have the technical capability to be a
developer, although I assume you do, otherwise you wouldn't even
consider applying. I don't recall specifically having read your
posts, especially as I rarely follow full threads on -devel, and even
more rarely pay much attention to who has written them (unless it's
someone such as Ian Jackson or Wichert Akkerman), so I can't really
give comments on the appropriateness or otherwise of your posts.
But it's worth knowing a few things:
- Sadly, developers do flame each other. Part of the Internet
culture, and it needs bearing. I've been flamed more than once for
innocent mistakes.
- As a developer, besides helping to develop Debian, you, too, will
develop. I've been a developer since the day of the planned slink
freeze a few months ago, and I've learnt some interesting C idioms,
lots of Perl, some basic X-Windows programming, *lots* about the
way Debian works, both technically and personally, lots about
computer security (I knew nothing about /tmp races before I began)
and so on. It's a real two-way process.
- And finally, the new-developer team are overworked volunteers who
are also trying to maintain their own packages. So if you haven't
heard from them within a month or so, it's worth sending a polite
reminder. And again the following month, etc. But in the
meantime, start working on packaging something. You could always
email -mentors to say "I'm not yet a developer, but I've just
packaged X with the intention to upload it if and when I am
accepted; it's available from <URI>, and I'd love it if someone
could check it out." And you could tell new-maintainers the same
thing ;-)
Looking forward to having you on our team!
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer. jdg@debian.org
-*- Finger jdg@master.debian.org for my PGP public key. -*-
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