Hi, > I understand that training a newbie on how to write a good patch is an > investment in the future. But that assumes that the person is going > to stick around so that eventually they become a contributing member > of the development community. If it's someone who sends a drive-by > patch, spending 3x the amount of time training them is not a good use > of the maintainer's time, especially if there are multiple newbies > demanding the maintainer's attention.
How about this strategy: instead of disabling or ignoring Merge Requests on Salsa, take a peek at them at least once before uploading, engage with the ones that you feel have a chance of being good, and for the ones that are hopeless from your point of view, simply comment that you saw it but that it requires significantly more work, and suggest the submitter reaches out to Debian Mentors? I agree that I too have noticed the pattern that bugs or patches sent via the BTS have on average higher quality because of higher barrier to entry. But I have also noticed that the number of active uploaders in Debian has howered around 1300 for a decade and isn't growing, while the number of contributors (both high quality and low quality) keeps growing in other communities where the barriers for contributing is lower. I don't think it is in the long-term interests of Debian to just disable MRs or ignore MRs completely out of fear that the contributions may be of low quality. Instead have some boilerplate response ready for the low quality ones to let them know they need to increase the effort they put in and/or seek a mentor from our places where new contributors are offered mentorship and handholding.
