Re: NM status: separate DAM approval and account creation?
On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 09:54:08AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 05:25:05AM -0800, ivan-debian-newmaint@420.am wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 01:12:34PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> > > * <tbm@cyrius.com> [2005-03-28 13:56]:
> > > > > Since the DAM approval and actual account creation steps are now
> > > > > being done by different people, do you think it would be useful to
> > > > > create a new category called "Applicants waiting for account
> > > > > creation" and to have people get moved there once they get DAM
> > > > > approval? This would no doubt help people who are checking
> > > > > regularly to see where they are in the queue.
> > > >
> > > > I can change the script to do this if the DAMs ask me to.
> > >
> > > Joerg just told me that it's okay with him so I've done this now.
> >
> > Umm, so our applicants are now held up waiting on the same previous
> > inactive DAM as before, and "creation" is newspeak for "approval"?
>
> He's not inactive. There have been some 20 or so new accounts made in the
> past couple of months.
I stand corrected. *Almost* completly inactive.
> I imagine James is probably kind of busy at work at the moment.
Right, and James has been kind of busy at work for years now.
It doesn't matter, I'm not criticizing James. We're all volunteers
here, we do what we can in the time we can spare, sometimes we drop or
forget things or become less responsive than people would like, even for
years at a time. I'm no less guilty of that then the next party.
Whatever.
But as a *project*, we need to stop being so anemic at routing around
inactivity. We can't allow one person to bottleneck a critical process,
whether it be NM or NEW queue processing. The NM process has been
stalled on and (mostly) off for *many years* now. We're self-selecting
maintainers for their ability to wait patiently for absurd lengths of
time far out of proportion to the things we actually want to be checking
for. Is there any wonder we can't manage to release?
>From what I understand, Joerg was appointed as a DAM to help alleviate
this bottleneck. The fact that we then turn around and make this task
nothiing more than a another part of the front desk and we're all
sitting here waiting patiently for James to actually do things again is
ludicrous and insulting to Joerg's appointment.
> And no, creation and approval are separate steps, they've just
> been merged into one list in the past because the same person has
> historically done both jobs.
I'm having a hard time swallowing this revisionist take on things.
http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint#DAM says what I think most
people expect, that the DAMs are the people who *manage accounts*. The
appointment of an additional DAM should mean what this says. Joerg
wasn't appointed to "Back Desk".
> Now we have one person reviewing all AM
> reports for completeness and correctness, and another person doing all of
> the boring housekeeping drek to actually insert the approved applicants into
> the Debian infrastructure.
I'm finding it a bit hard to swallow that it isn't already scripted
easily enough for another person to use, but if that's actually the
case, let's *say so* instead of speculating and handwaving about
"hosekeeping drek", stop sitting on our hands and script it up. It
doesn't take a genius to write an account creation script. Yes, I'm
volunteering, if that's what it takes.
Our NMs deserve better than this.
--
ivan@debian.org
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