When I later posted an RFS for a ruby package, I got a couple suggestions from non-DDs.

So I’ve fiddled with the packaging a bit more, and in the interim found someone I know who is a DD who promised to look at the packages when I was ready again (holidays).

I understand the difficulties with educating a group of users where you can’t tell if it will be worth it or not. However my time is valuable as well and always goes to the projects that I get responses from. From the outside looking in, it’s likely a social problem. It’s too easy to forgot how difficult it can be when you have experience dealing with a problem.

I suppose when someone emails an RFS, it should be tied (cc’d) by policy to the ITP bug. There should be some way to search for ITPs with an associated RFS, a state. If a bug remains in that state without any comment for a certain period of time it should send out a reminder or at least be searchable for that fashion and a group of DDs should regularly watch this result, trying to discover why the process has stalled.

I suppose this is kind of like the volunteers on launchpad who don’t actually resolve bugs, but manage ensuring that all the information is collected that a developer would need to fix the bug.

But I don’t know of any other software projects- open source or otherwise- to which it is any easier to contribute in a social vacuum. If you have some good ideas in that arena, I’d be happy to pass them on.

A side note regarding motivation- when I joined Debian, it wasn’t for power or even through a desire to help. I used Debian, and I wanted it to get better, and the best way to make it better was to share my improvements with the rest of the community so my work could be inspected, further improved by others, and so on.

Anyway, as I neglected to mention above, thanks for this post. It came in handy today.

Most work requires getting someone to pay attention. If you fix a bug, even if you do all the work possible and create a dpatch or quilt patch file that just needs to be dropped in, you still need to get someone to do it.

I’ve recently put effort into helping with packaging, but it’s still a matter of needing to know someone. Sending an RFS doesn’t put you in any sort of queue, someone has to be feeling nice and want to look over your packaging for you.

Becoming a maintainer requires you go through a lot of these steps, which are heavily social. In the end, you have to be driven to want to help (or maybe want power of some kind?) to contribute. The challenge of learning to do everything the debian way is hard enough on it’s own.

If you want to get further involved than that, take a look at http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint for information on how you can join Debian in a more official way.