Hi,
On 21/05/2025 17:48, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
Debian has certainly done many things right in the past 30 years, but
treatment of new contributors is currently pretty harsh, considering
how many cracks and false turns they need to overcome on to become
regular contributors.
The impact successive roadblocks can have on new contributors motivation
and retention is likely to be underestimated by many long-time
developers as a consequence of survivor bias.
I've also heard things like "well it weeds out those that are not
motivated enough" which could also be said of way too many corporate
recruitment processes. You probably know what I'm talking about, and if
you are experienced enough you probably figured out that unless the
offer is really, really outstanding on other grounds the best way to
deal with these is to vote with your feet and go elsewhere (and let
these managers keep whining that they can't find qualified candidates in
months).
debbugs is IMO not the most pressing issue right now, though it is
definitely something that should be worked on, as even seasoned
contributors are complaining.
I would first try to improve the Salsa registration process. I
understand the need to prevent recurrent abuse, but the current manual
approval process with its delay and lack of feedback when things go
wrong is likely to discourage casual contributors, as what could have
been done in a few minutes now requires attention over multiple hours or
days.
Ideally it should be possible to register and authenticate using some
well-known external identity providers. Google, GitLab and Bitbucket are
already listed but IMO GitHub is missing, and adding Microsoft and Apple
might be worth considering.
There is already a self-service web UI at signup.salsa.debian.org.
Currently it only allows creating new teams (GitLab groups), but it
could certainly integrate new features such as:
- a registration request status page, with a nice URI that could be
pasted e.g. on IRC should that be needed
- generating and managing invitation links (or emails) by registered
DDs, DMs and maybe even DCs; such links would only be valid for a
limited time, could only be used once, accounts created with them would
not require manual approval, and the person generating them could be
held accountable for abuse
- allowing any DD to browse pending registrations, view details and
approve a registration.
Other known problems for new contributors include:
- false positives in Debian spam filters and lack of feedback; a
self-service UI to track what happened to a given message-ID would help
- privacy issues with public archives (bugs, mailing-lists, git
repositories, package sources) that show unredacted e-mail addresses; no
easy solution here, the best approach is probably a dedicated address or
something like Apple's Hide My Email
- plain old IRC's lack of support for (searchable) channel history,
conversation threads, (formatted) code or logs snippets, sharing files
and images, sharing a screen interactively, being usable with
intermittent connections; probably no good solution that would keep
interoperability with IRC
- the wiki that requires another separate and manually processed
registration, isn't too convenient to work with and lacks some features.
Anything else you know that could be improved?
Cheers,
--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène
