Quoting Otto Kekäläinen (2025-08-22 22:34:16) > Let me share a story about something that happened this week. A person > I am mentoring had been planning to contribute to Debian for a long > time. I suggested they start small by for example fixing a bug in an > existing package (as doing a new upstream import or a completely new > package is a lot more work and has steeper learning curve). My mentee > found a bug in a package they use, the researched it well and found > the correct solution and posted it as a MR on the package on August > 7th. I reviewed it on August 8th and concluded that it looked correct > to me, but since it was an actively maintained package I asked the > maintainer to say the final word as pushing it directly without > coordination is not that collaborative, even though technically I > could have done it as this was a package in /debian/ namespace on > Salsa. > > On August 19th the maintainer closed the MR. He thanked the submitter > for it but decided that merging or was too much effort after he did > other changes on the main branch, so he just went ahead and did the > exact same change himself to save time/effort for himself. > > End result is that this new contributor did not get his name in the > git commit log, his Salsa profile does not show that he has any > successfully merged MRs (even thought he change was fully correct and > identical to what the maintainer did), the contributor won't find his > name in the changelog nor get anything accumulated at > https://contributors.debian.org/contributor/<name>. > > So all the effort the submitter did - and also me as mentor - was in > vain. This is not the end of the world, but I wanted to share it as an > anecdote of the new contributor experience.
I find that to be a story about bad maintainership. Not about MRs being particularly good for maintenance nor as a learning or training aid for newcomers, however. What I find bad is to not credit *in changelog* the person contributing a change notable of being mentioned in changelog. I find it perfectly sensible for the maintainer to choose to not preserve git commits - after all, Debian is not tracked in git, it is tracked in this other (arguably archaic, but that's for another time) thing called source packages, where the history is kept in a file debian/changelog. Just in case anyone cares. I have noted that Otto seems to not care about my comments in this thread. But perhaps others. Not really sure why we are still beating this MR horse as a thing we all ought to do for Debian to not loose its new contributors... - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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