Debian Maintainers GR Proposal [LWN.net]

Anthony Town posted a proposed general resolution to the Debian-vote list, Debian Maintainers GR Proposal. It's about having a second keyring for Debian maintainers who don't want to be full fledged Debian Developers. This second keyring would provided limited upload ability to unstable or experimental.

Anthony's proposal is in seven parts:

covers the initial creation of the keyring and a team to manage it.
covers the initial policy for adding maintainers to the keyring.
covers the initial policy for removal from the keyring.
covers the initial policy for Debian developers who wish to advocate a potential Debian maintainer.
covers the initial policy for the use of the Debian Maintainer keyring within the Debian archive.
covers the initial relationship to the existing new-maintainer (n-m) procedure - this will be an independent means of contributing to Debian.
and there is no initial policy or plans for use of the keyring outside the archive.

The proposal got a few seconds, but attracted quite a bit of debate. Bastian Venthur wondered why not just improve the new maintainer process: "So, why such a complicated GR introducing second class DDs? Just grant a few more rights to our NMs and try to improve the NM process in the long run and everybody will be happy."

Raphël Hertzog pointed to previous discussions, "In short, this DM status is complementary to NM. It's not working around any deficiency in the NM process."

Joey Schulze raised the concern, "I fear that the DM thingy is just invented to get more people [to] maintain packages in Debian without becoming properly involved, eventually not giving the same care a normal DDviaNM would give and thus Debian ending up with a universe of broken packages. That's most certainly not what I would like Debian to become in the future."

Anthony pointed out:

The NM process is designed to create new Debian Developers -- particularly with the ability to participate fully in the project, NMUing, hijacking packages, voting, raising and seconding GRs, following -private, creating new .debian.net services, accounts on dozens of machines, become a DPL delegate, run for DPL, represent Debian, do transverse activities across the distribution, etc....

People should be able to contribute at the level they feel comfortable with; if that increases over time, that's great; if it stays constant or decreases, we shouldn't try to force them to do more than they want, or refuse to accept what they're willing to do.

That doesn't mean lowering our standards of what we distribute, just being willing to accept packages that are able to be maintained to our standards more efficiently than we currently do.

In another post he added:

The NM process is about making new DDs -- who participate fully in the project, and understand and agree with its goals. Not every useful contributor to Debian actually wants that status -- Matthew Garrett's one example of a former DD who'd like to contribute to Debian without being a DD, and this is a way of making that more effective. Likewise there are plenty of people who'd like to make a small contribution to Debian without having to obtain the level of knowledge and experience we expect of DDs.

The debate continues and so far little seems to be resolved. We can expect a somewhat re-worded proposal to go out though, which may well receive the required number of seconds to get it to a vote.

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