On 04/06/2025 16:31, Russ Allbery wrote:
Ahmad Khalifa <ah...@khalifa.ws> writes:
Joachim was mislead by an RFH. Even raised an MR and still got ignored.
I replied to an RFH bug, got ignored. Raised an MR and still got ignored
(my MR is only 5 months old, maybe still hope?).
The most common (not the only) reason why packages file an RFH bug, in my
experience, is that they are overwhelmed and unable to keep up with the
packaging, which unfortunately is the same state that will lead them to
not responed to MRs. Unfortunately, often the ideal response to an RFH bug
is for an experienced Debian maintainer who wouldn't require much
assistance to offer to be co-maintainer directly. It's hard for a newcomer
to offer that type of help, through absolutely no fault of the newcomer.
Often RFH bugs are not filed until the situation is already dire and the
existing maintainers may not be able to mentor newcomers or perform a
clean handoff to anyone other than an experienced Debian developer. This
is very much not ideal, and I wish this were not the case, but I suspect
that means that, at the moment, RFH is more useful as a flag for
experienced developers, and newcomers will find it easier to contribute to
packages that, paradoxically, are not tagged as needing help.
But something has to break the cycle. There is no daily standup or a
project manager to come in and ask for updates here :)
Debian has the RFA process, orphaning, submitting another RFH, etc...
I don't know, but seems no one wants to solve this and the status quo is
fantastic as it is.
--
Regards,
Ahmad
