On Mon, 2024-12-02 at 21:54 -0700, Antonio Russo wrote:

On 12/2/24 18:15, Soren Stoutner wrote:

Unfortunately, I think that many contributor’s experiences with Debian are
closer to what I experienced with Guix than what I experienced with Debian. If we can change that, I think we would see an influx of contributions to the
project.

As a contributor who would like to contribute more, I can second (third?) this. I am continually coming across minor-to-major problem which I eventually resolve for myself. In the past, the difficulty of even getting bug reports with patches that resolve issues to be looked at, much less merged really wore on me.

My personal journey has been to establish pipelines to rebuild packages with those fixes in them for myself and my family members. After getting those issues diagnosed (a strict requirement), my top priority is now to maintain those pipelines. From a "boundary setting" perspective, I limit my time trying to communicate those fixes, either to Debian or further upstream.

Moreover, I'm increasingly of the opinion that fixes should only be presented when they are both absolutely perfect for myself and from a software engineering perspective, since it seems that even minor details will be criticized, if the issues are even responded to at all. If projects don't seem receptive, I often de-prioritize sending patches to them. Debian falls into that category.

This means that some issues go years (and counting) without those fixes merged. And my personal drive to get them merged is near-zero at this point, since it doesn't really even benefit me personally.

I understand everyone is busy (as I am, too). But seeing contributions go unacknowledged demoralizes people a lot.

Perhaps teams could start looking at human-contributed MRs and patch-tagged bug reports that have been untouched for more than (say) 6 months? I haven't mustered the care to try to send another RFS in over a year, but looking
at debian-mentors triage work recently, it seems like things might be
better.

Antonio

Hi Antonia,

It is easy to feel criticized in a project such as Debian. You can submit to three packages in two teams and each may have their own contribution criteria. Modifying patches or MR's to make them comply or make them better is all part of the game and in most cases not personal at all. Never feel a contribution needs to be perfect prior to submission, we learn contributing and who you submit to can also learn from your contributions and interactions in some cases.

Regards

Phil

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