I have a few suggestions for improving packaging communications * https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Pending_packages
where I'll keep updated the status of my packaging, and I'll try to forward notices from the mailing list. Having something on the wiki makes things a bit more organized. I've changed the links a bit so to tell people to look on that page first for important notices. * Mageia-mentors mailing list or backup mentors It would be good if there was a mageia-mentors mailing list in which private e-mail to and from the mentors could be cc'ed to so that all of the mentors would have an overview of what conversations would happen and there would be a "backup" in case a mentor goes offline. Alternatively, people could get in a the habit of having a backup mentor cc'ed that can respond if something comes up. It would also be good to change the instruction page with something instructions like "if you don't hear back from X in three days, then do Y" What happened with me was that I had been packaging a large number of packages and coordinating things offline with my mentor. I mentioned that I was packaging cinnamon and then when I was done (and it was just a minor project), I mentioned that I was done. I didn't hear back, but that's happened before, and that's not a problem. The problem was that when I looked on the dev list for something unrelated, I found out that the cinnamon packages had been bounced. That wasn't a problem since they had been bounced for very good technical reasons, which I've been fixing. Unfortunately, I was reading the e-mail out of context so it looked to me like some tiny cabal had bounced all my packages for no reason at all, and so I went ballistic. The most annoying problem is that no one mentioned it me that there was a technical issue with cinnamon. Part of the issue is since I'm new, I don't know the people, and so I can't tell based on limited information if people are being reasonable or not. Automatically assuming that people are being reasonable won't work, because you'll find a lot of groups on the internet in which people aren't reasonable (i.e. there is a reason why people are dumping Gnome3 for Cinnamon) and people don't have the time and energy to find out what's going on, and there is a lot of "pseudo-reasonableness" out there. Working with a lot of volunteer groups has made me a little paranoid when someone seems nice. For people with a CS bent, a lot of issues that you run into with coordinating people are the same that you run into in coordinating CPU/GPU's and doing parallel computing. You can map some of the issues that I've run into into the "two generals problem".
