On 04/06/25 6:27 pm, Ahmad Khalifa wrote:
> On 04/06/2025 13:28, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> Alternatively (because that might indeed be a waste of time), please
>> consider framing personal opinions as such, not as absolutes.  Reason
>> I encourage you to do that is that I want to discuss with you, and I
>> find it easier to discuss when the conversation is easy to separate
>> opinion from fact.
> 
> Everything I say is my opinion. I have no formal role here.
> The top message is only a polite suggestion.
> 
> Consider this random new contributor's experience:
> 
> 1. Go to https://www.debian.org/, click on "Get Involved, Contribute"
> 2. Read https://www.debian.org/devel/join/, points you to "WNPP"
> 3. Go to https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/, browse the page
>     - At that point, you might not know what is adoption and orphans.
>     - Easiest thing to dip your toes in: "packages in need of help".
> 4. Go to the RFH page, https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested
> 5. Browse interesting bugs:
>     - Read the spam messages, maybe click on "this bug has spam"
>       (which I feel is a placebo)
>     - Look at other comments and interactions, no closed loop, no 
> conclusions
>     - Realize the bug is several years old
>     - Decide that it's beyond a newcomer's ability and move on
> 
> Of course, this is my opinion, but it's debian's primary journey from 
> the homepage.

As unfortunate as it may sound, some of this is actually true. The worse part is
if the newcomers want to chat, the official media in Debian for that is IRC, 
which
is hard to use and setup a bouncer and so on. I don't argue against making our 
tooling
better.

_However_ that being said, there are alternate pathways too -- it is IMHO not 
as bad as you frame it.

1. Let's say a contributor has interest in Scientific packages in Debian.
2. They web search "Debian scientific packages"
3. The search engine gives them https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience and 
https://science-team.pages.debian.net/policy/#idm36 along with the mailing 
lists to join
4. They seek help on the list for their issues and start contributing.
5. Let's say the team they choose is not very active - they go ahead a look for 
another team or
other packages of their interest.

Contributing to a free software project such as Debian often times needs a bit 
of patience. People do have
changing interests and move across different areas if they are more inclined.

To reach over until RFH as per the 4th point in _your_ mail, it takes a few 
minutes. And probably as few more
to reach to the state that you describe in your 5th point. Things take time, 
and I believe a few minutes
is really short time to give up.

You can try contributing to any other large project like Debian. You will see 
plenty of issues being stalled, or being hard to solve and so on. This is not 
something that's totally unique to the debian project.


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