On Wed, 4 Jun 2025, Marc Haber wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Jun 04, 2025 at 06:22:49PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
I suggest to instead more narrowly guide them towards *recent* *RFP*
bugreports rather than WNPP bugreports in general.
It will not surprise me if some newcomers find recent RFP bugreports a
total waste of their time, but I know from experience that some do not.
Maintaining a package is a significant commitment. I'd prefer newcomers to
fix bugs instead. There it doesnt hurt when they vanish after a few months.
And, when you "just" fix bugs, you don't have to the next frustrating
threadmill that we offer: looking for a sponsor.
Although just fixing bugs has its own frustrations.
I mostly used to write "works for me" fixes and now I look to submitting
to upstream first and go to the BTS if I can't quickly see how to open a
bug/MR upstream.
There's a patch for apt-cacher-ng for a multi-year old bug that I know
is in use in at least three large deployments due to private emails. The
patch could do with some TLC, the comments in particular reflect my
journey of understanding rather than the final state, and had I got
prompt feedback I'd have done that work but a year plus later I'd have
to spend time reminding myself just what was going on - at this point
anyone is as well placed as me to do that cleanup - and I'm not sure I'd
bother, if there's ever a new release I'll get an alert and if there
isn't well "it works for me".
The BTS doesn't help either, that bug I was subscribed to, but I never
got any notification of the most recent comments (which turned out to be
noise anyway)
A while back I fixed a number of FTBFS and usr-merge bugs in packages I
care about. Those were merged, but as NMU which I found out by accident
when I went looking at what was going on months later. TBH I was
thinking "why bother?" although actually it should have been a positive
experience.
I'm not sure if I would want to be a Debian Developer. There's another
package that now has fixes of mine I need upstream and the temptation to
"fix" the debian package with a silent maintainer would be difficult to
resist but spending hours reading documentation on how to do this
officially would feel annoying when I already have a working and
deployed package locally.
I do have dreams of winding down my paid work and having more time for
open source, and maybe I'll hope to be more than a drive-by contributor,
but most of my 'Debian' time right now is making sure I'm not dependent
on debian for fixes while still taking advantage of all the great work
that does happen.
