[Pkg-javascript-devel] lots of requests to join pkg-javascript

[Paolo Greppi]

On 05/01/2017 14:00, Pirate Praveen wrote:
> On വ്യാഴം 05 ജനുവരി 2017 06:09 വൈകു, Ximin Luo wrote:
>> This has nothing to do with tools, as Jonas mentioned it is about a continual time dedication to a FOSS project. Please try to understand this.
> Yes, it has a lot to do with our tools. If we were using a git hosting
> tool like gitlab or pagure, we could have reviewed pull requests before
> we grant access to a new contributor.
> 
> You can't demand such dedication from a new contributor. Did you sign
> such a commitment before you got access to pkg-javascript team and debian?
> 
> What did you mean when you said they can use github.com? Isn't that
> evidence of our lack of tools to bring new people to debian? Why should
> I tell anyone to use a proprietary service to contribute to debian? This
> is something we got to fix.

When I read this, I became curious about who creates and contributes to repos in /git/pkg-javascript. Here is what I found out thanks to my paolog-guest shell access to git.d.o.

There are 876 subdirs in /git/pkg-javascript, and they were created by 30 guest accounts and 37 non-guest accounts. A recursive search on all contained files & subdirs yields a grand total of 33 guest accounts and 46 non-guest (apparently not many people push to repositories someone else had created).

For those git repos we are using a setup that the git docs [1] advise for "a small outfit", but 79 seems more than "few developers" ... For larger teams they advise gitosis or gitolite; only the latter seems to be an active project and is packaged as gitolite3.

My comments:

- the tools we have are in line with rest of the debian tools (WOT, BTS ...): CLI, raw and based on trust

- granting shell access to guests is consistent with that culture

- but 10 new guest accounts added to the pkg-javascript team in one shot is a lot (+30%); also mass requests to join the team sound like spamming (but that's clearly not the case here !)

- when I was a student at the uni a long time ago I remember we were willing to go a long way to please the professors **before** the exam ;-)

- if gitolite were installed and configured on moszumanska (git.d.o.), it would probably be possible to set up access control on select repos for external "contributors"; "contributor" here is meant in a sense similar to "debian contributor" idea [2].

In conclusion, Debian Contributor is a suitable status for a student who wants to give it a try during a seminar. If they pass the exam and **afterwards** out of their free will submit a request to join pkg-javascript, then the path from contributor to DD is open to them !

Paolo

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server#Small-Setups
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/12/msg00009.html