Re: casual contributors (was: patch going unpushed)

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 07:11:27AM +0100, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Graham Percival
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > So yes, you've been doing everything right.  We simply don't have
> > anybody who is willing to do ~30 minutes of admin work per week to
> > help casual contributors.
> 
> For the record, i was frog meister for some time and i have to say
> that depending on quantity and skill of new contributors, frog meister
> work can take significantly longer than 30 minutes a week (if you want
> to give your contributors more attention than "send me a patch for
> pushing").

But we *don't* want to give any more attention than "send me a
patch".  ok, in a perfect world, we'd have a team of 100
experienced developers who would personally fly to anybody's house
and give them personal face-to-face help as soon as somebody
expressed an interest.  But that's not happening.

We need a *secretary*.  We need a *paper pusher*.  We need a
trained monkey.  I could even teach a first-year university
student how to be a perfect Frog meister, and having taught for a
few years you have no idea how low my opinion of those creatures
are.

We need somebody to say "thank you for your interest, please read
this link to get your patch in the review stream", and then a few
days later, to say "great, your patch has been accepted, please
email me your final patch".  You don't even need to have git push
ability; if you take care of the administration, just send me the
final patch for pushing.  This has absolutely *nothing* to do with
programming.


I cannot emphasize how little I want from the frog meister, other
than keeping up with email on a daily basis and looking at the
countdown when it finishes three times a week.

- Graham