Ahmad Khalifa <ah...@khalifa.ws> writes: > I just thought there would have been a much higher willingness to > discuss how to improve things. I was wrong.
Sorry, yes, Debian discussions around workflow are often frustrating because part of the discussion is usually at least a mild request for existing maintainers to change their current workflows, and when people feel overwhelmed, changing workflows often feels particularly draining. Sometimes we manage to steer the discussion away from existing maintainers changing how they currently do things towards creating recommended best practices for *new* maintainers, and those are often less fraught. My personal experience in Debian is that the best workflow discussions often happen inside packaging groups where the shared problems are of more limited scope and more immediately concrete and where often there is more of a general consensus about desired directions. Debian-wide workflow discussions are quite challenging because there is such a huge diversity of opinion and practice. I think there *is* willingness to have the discussion but I think it's fair to say that it is lower than one might expect coming in from outside, at least in debian-devel. It's one of the places in Debian where I think it's often better to find a group of likeminded people and just do a thing for the packages that you collectively maintain, sort out the various issues, and then write it up. > This is not different from other projects, except that debian has a > lower percentage of paid contributors. They all solve it by prioritising > important things, dropping less important things, etc... I don't like > it, but reality! > Basic prioritisation is where the idea of timing out older WNPP issues > comes from. I think the problem you're running into there is that people perceive closing old WNPP issues as making the information in them disappear. I'm not sure that's quite accurate, but it certainly makes it much harder to find. The currently system serves one use case (please show me all previous discussions about packaging this software) at the cost of another use case (show me things that are currently being worked on). An ideal system would serve both use cases. > The other point is that if debian can't handle its current workload, why > is debian inviting people to package 20 year old projects that don't > even have an upstream page. > Anyway, I learned to ignore most WNPP pages now. Indeed, you have now reached the same point that I suspect 95% of Debian maintainers are at: ignoring WNPP other than filing ITP bugs when we package new packages. This is not great! I think it would be fantastic if someone tackled fixing the WNPP system, but I'm not sure just closing old issues would make the difference you're hoping for because people still aren't looking at it. I think it requires a bit of a rethink about what it's actually for, which I suspect is much less about requesting people package things and more about maintaining a persistent database of work in progress and work previously considered that was never finished for some reason. The one part of WNPP that I think is useful in the obvious way for what it was intended to be useful for, and which I think is even useful for newcomers, is the O bugs. Adopting orphaned software is often a good way to get started in Debian if you are (like me) someone who learns better when starting with something that's already working but flawed, rather than starting from scratch on new work. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
