Re: Debian Maintainers GR Proposal

On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 06:37:12PM +0200, Bastian Venthur wrote:
> And the main question is is still open: Why do we need this DM status?
> Which problem does it solve, if not the ones with our NM process?

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.

I've AMed one person, Holger, so I'm not in a position to comment usefully
on changing n-m, and that just doesn't factor into my goals. Marc, who
made the -devel-announce post I linked to is a member of Front Desk, and
seemed to think implementing something like this would be a good approach
to improving n-m, but you'd have to ask him or others more involved in
n-m than I am for opinions on how this might help or hurt n-m, or what
other approraches there might be to improving n-m.

> I think Anthony should have give those reasons directly in his proposal,
> so that people like me who don't know what he's trying to solve don't
> have to guess.

I don't really find worry about other people's motives particularly
useful, but fwiw, my main motivation is making it more efficient for all
the non-DD maintainers in the project to continue participating as they
are, and my secondary motivation is to provide an easy and low-impact way
for people to "join" Debian in a meaningful sense. Going through n-m as
it is isn't what I'd call "easy", and changing n-m isn't what I'd call
"low-impact". YMMV of course.

Cheers,
aj