 Interactions. Hello and welcome to the Debian new member Pof. I'm Ericko Zini, one of the Debian account managers, people who have responsibility for who is a member in Debian. And I'm John McDowell. I'm involved with the front desk which is sort of assigning new members to application managers and whatever and also key ring maintenance of the person or one of the people who adds keys to the Debian key ring once they've gone through this process and actually joined the project proper. Who among you is an application manager? Who among you is in the new member process at the moment? One, two, three. You are a Schrödinger new member. At any moment you can look inside the box and discover your Adidi. Waiting for the account to be created. Okay we have a bit of a presentation. The people who didn't raise hand. Recent graduate. Recent graduate. Meaning? I'm a DD now. Okay, right. Okay. Other people who didn't raise hand. Curious. Lurking. Lurking. Excellent. Perfect. As a recent graduate can I ask how you find the experience? Lots of delays involved. On whose part? Not naming names but sort of on most of the people. You seem to be characterised by delays. In some cases nine months or more. Nine months is a lot. Recent graduate as in you became an AD in the last six months? Last summer. Last summer. You flushed me through. Right. So was that nine months? Stay still. Was that nine months without any contact? Oh, okay. Yeah. Was that nine months without any contact between you and the person involved like other than, I mean, an occasional pendent? Did you get anyone else involved in that or was it just a waiting for the other? I didn't want to get into it but yes I tried to get other people involved and got no response. Okay. That's bad because occasionally, I mean, I've certainly had at least one experience in my front with my front desk hat on of discovering someone who had sort of several months of no reply and I'd only just got around to emailing someone else about it and going that's been like, you know, three or four months with no reply. What's going on? It's like, Oh, right. Well, because once a process has been assigned from my perspective in front desk, if I assign you an application manager, it goes away from my view. You're you're dealing with someone else whose responsibility it is then to make that project process move along. And I have no visibility unless I actively go and have a look at what meals have been exchanged, which I don't do because I'm not micromanaging anyone. I've got other things to do, but equally it means that if there's a problem you have to email front desk, you know, if you see a problem like that, then we're not always going to fix the problem. If front desk fell down, I apologize for that. But NM at devian.org, if you've got delays in your process that you think are unreasonable, if you're sitting waiting for more than a few weeks and there's no explanation for it, drop from desk and mail. I have happily unassigned applicants from application managers who are not responsive and find them someone else. I can't promise I'll get you someone immediately, but we will help move those processes along. It could be that a year ago there wasn't you. And from desk was not responsive. Okay. That is... We've got better, I promise. It looks like. Yeah, so ideally you would, so the idea of an NM process is supposed to take a couple of weeks at the most for an average amount. Yeah, that's not ideal indeed. Because one is supposed to apply only when already ready to have an account. Most of the check should have been done by the advocate, but we know from experience we cannot just trust the advocate. We've had advocates going, yeah, I had a beer with that person last night. They seem good enough. I'm not kidding. It wasn't a beer, I think. I hosted them at my place, but anyway. And so the application manager is supposed to do peer review of the advocate in theory, which means asking a few questions as a person who hasn't worked with the applicant figure if indeed they look ready to have an account and say, go ahead, create an account. And in theory, either the person feels like they're ready a member of the project, then the account. Then one say, yeah, okay, go in. Or the person feels like they don't, they're really not feeling like a member of the project. Then one can say, not yet. And that should be it. It shouldn't really take much. But then there are life issues. So motivations change. The routine in somebody's life doesn't include NM anymore. There's issues in acknowledging one doesn't have time and always going like, oh, but maybe I can tomorrow. So it's like, if I have the time to give the person back, then I have the time to answer their email, which is sick. But it kind of works like that. So what is, what is in my head? It's a couple of weeks, stats. One of them was all the way through in my three weeks plan. And that's being very quick. From my personal experience on both AM and front asking three weeks, I would say is reasonably quick. The questions that are asked are wordy. It does take some time to answer the response. You know, people need time. I need time to sit down and actually do justice to reading it. And people need time. Even whenever they know the answers, it takes time to sit down and put something on paper. So three weeks doesn't seem unreasonable. Two years is absolutely ludicrous. But sure. So on the flip side, I've had a couple of applicants, I mean, I've got one right now who is not necessarily responding for one month the next is, is interested, but here's to a lot of quiet. I've just picked it, in fact. It's a lot of do we do we leave things and obviously some of it was I went quiet for a month. That was a way of vacation, that kind of thing. It's a it's managing expectations. And sure. And the initial process of managing those expectations about how long the process should take is between the applicant and the application manager. And, you know, if an applicant is busy, there's no problem about them going, it's gonna take me a couple weeks, I'm away on business. I dealt with Jonathan's application and he told me at one point, look, I'm going to be away. I'm traveling on business, I won't be able to respond. No problem. Like, you know, when we came back, we picked it up again. Sometimes I'm busy and it's like, it'll take me a few days. That's fine. But if it gets to the point that one side isn't comfortable with the delays that are going on, if you're an application manager, and your applicant is taking, you know, two months to reply, then you need to put them on hold so that you can actually deal with somebody's ready to go. And equally, if you're an applicant who's, you know, AM is taking two months to reply, and you're ready to go, you need to contact front desk so we can try and get you someone a bit more responsive. I didn't mean to hijack this issue. And let me just say that I contributed to the delay. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The delays tend to involve more than one person. But there are, and I think there have been issues in the past with either we haven't had enough application managers. As of today, we're actually quite good and we've got a bunch of people with spare slots, we're actually on top of things. It's a good day for an MMBUFF. We've got like four or five people with free slots and no one will need to be assigned. But that's not always the case. Sometimes I've had people come back and it's been a few weeks before we've had a spare AM to give them. So the delay sometimes not really happened. For people who aren't in the process, but are thinking about it, is there anything, you know, that's making you hold off on it? Or are you just sort of weighing it up at the moment? Or are there concerns? Is there something we can be doing better? No one's done so that one. Scream? Or me? I can't do stats at the moment. It requires more programming than I can wing at the moment. Two minutes later, I'm not sure if this, it's not clear to me what it means to be a member. Could you talk a bit about this? In the end, there's several, everyone that contributes to Debian is a Debian contributor. That title is purely, if you do something, you don't need to have any process to get. And contributors show up on nm.debian.org, hopefully, as long as they contribute in one part of Debian where there's a data feed for the site. If one doesn't show up, one is encouraged to help create a data feed for the site in that part of Debian. And to be a Debian contributor entitles you to say that you contribute to Debian. Then there's an official membership that gives at Debian.org email address and the right to vote and other things, which kind of makes it official that a person has been contributing to Debian for long enough that they have an idea how the project works and they should influence the choices of the project. In the project election, they can be trusted to log in into the various Debian machines. And if having upload rights, they can also be trusted to upload any package in Debian at any time. So that has some responsibility related to it, so that in order to get that, there is a process where you need an advocate that says that person is effectively a part of Debian that's making it official. And then there is an application manager that will exchange some emails to kind of peer review what the advocate said. And then if it goes well, then there's a ticket in an issue tracker asking for the account to be created. So this is the new member process. So there's the Debian contributors and the Debian members. It used to be called Debian maintainers, but the Debian members are not necessarily maintaining packages. There may be writing web applications to run the new member process, for example. So the name has been changed at some point. Then there's a grey area thing called the Debian member, sorry for the Debian maintainer for extra confusion, which is a Debian contributor who gets white listed to upload specific packages. So when, because when you're not a Debian member, you can upload packages via a sponsor. So you give the package to a Debian member that will upload it for you. And the sponsor after a while can say, look, I've been uploading this package of yours for two years and I'm not even looking at it. So go ahead and upload it yourself. And so there is a, one can get white listed to upload packages and there's a quick check to see that you have a GPG encryption key that is, has been signed by someone. So you are somehow a distinct person. You have a reputation that is not completely anonymous to the project. And you would sign an email saying that you agree to uphold the Debian social contract in what you do. Because you get some responsibility, so there's like, at least you agree to do it the way that you expect things to be done. So that's kind of a grey area, but that's not an member of the project. It's more like to smoothen, sort of, decrease the load on the sponsor. We may sponsor other packages for you, but for that one, it's clear, you know, how to do it. And then after somebody's been a Debian maintainer for a while, then become a Debian developer. Or is there an interest in getting a particular package in the Debian and that's as far as it goes. You know, they want to maintain that package. They'll do the best they can. They have no interest, particularly in voting or getting involved in the heavyweight stuff. So Debian maintainership was introduced as a lightweight way that you can scratch that itch without having to go through the other bits if you don't want to. These days it's seen as a good stepping stone on the way to sort of getting full DD ship. But there's no problem with sticking around as a DM for as long as it is. It's an equally Debian contributors. It's a lightweight recognition of someone's involvement with the project. Who's dipping in and out or is doing something that they don't feel they need to go through the hoops to get to this extra stage. And, you know, again, we've now got a method of recognizing the fact that in the great work that lots of people do without going through all the formal hoops of the new member process. So it's a choice thing. You get to choose where you go to and unfortunately as there is slightly more rights and privileges associated with that particular level of membership there's a little bit more process to go through. Maybe I can make statistics. Got carried away. I mean it is a bough rather than prepared slides. We're kind of interested if anyone wants to ask something or make a comment or anything we can sort of help out with. It's kind of an informal session. Do you have any questions before they start out? No. There's a set of templates. So there are a set of templates that the AMs are encouraged to use and send out in terms of asking the questions and walking through them. And I've been doing this on and off for years depending on my activity levels. And I still use those. And I know of at least one instance someone told me about where their applicant had already downloaded them and they're in public. You can go and look at these. They're there. The applicant had already downloaded them before they entered the process, had worked out their answers to all of them, and it was a very quick process because they cut and pasted their answers pre-prepared into the mail. It's like, well, that's fine. That shows initiative. That shows you how to find stuff in Debian. It was their own answers. It was their own words of like this is the answer to the question. They'd had the time to answer the questions and also give things. But yeah, the AM process is pretty much you can log into the site and you can say, I've got a spare slot to sign me someone. And from this point of view, with the new AM, we're sort of trying to sign you someone who we think is a bit easier or maybe we know has got some highly visual contributions, which means it'll be a bit of an easier process for you to walk through as your first one. But yeah, maybe we should be better than that. I don't know. What are the contributors and members? Contributors and maintainers aren't necessarily members, but all members are contributors in some way. Is that the correct or the drawback? Contributors covers anyone who contributes to Debian. So if you file a bug, you comment on a bug, you contribute on the mailing list, you maintain something in the package or whatever it is, contributors.debian.org will track any contribution. So that's the super set of everyone. A Debian maintainer is someone who has the rights to upload one or more specific packages. So they have upload rights and a full on member who can either have uploading rights or no uploading rights is someone who's actually able to vote in the project and able to get sort of full access to sort of the project resources. And it's important to note that we have got this concept of a non-uploading Debian member, which we didn't previously have, which meant that some people who were maybe only doing documentation and we had a process that would have asked you about your packaging skills when what you wanted to contribute to Debian was nothing to do with that side of things and they were inappropriate questions. Now I can go the full step of getting access and having voting rights. And we still do some checks about do you understand free software, do you understand behind Debian and all of that stuff to make sure that people try and fit in with the ethos of the project, but you don't need to be even highly technical in order to be able to go down that path. I know that there are people who have been involved with organizing Debcom for years who have gone down that path and been recognised for their valuable contributions to the project. So the table at the top shows the various rights and the graph at the bottom shows how you can move between things. Does that help? Questions? Yeah, I have a question that maybe I couldn't have looked up myself. Should I have the other? Do people spend a certain amount of time or how much is the average amount of time that people spend as a contributor before applying for membership? Or is it that process just depends on the person on each person? Yeah, yeah, man. It's how long this piece of train. Obviously, you know, it depends on the person on each person. It depends on the person on each person. It depends on the person on each person. Obviously, you don't want someone coming cold into the member process of that sort of any experience of Debian and whatever. But sometimes people, I've seen people who are, I'm going to go down the new member route, but I've got some packages I'm already uploading. So I'm going to do the Debian maintainer process and then in parallel or very soon afterwards they start the membership process because of what they want to do. Going to be uploading a lot of new packages as part of the team they're involved with and it doesn't make sense for them to go through the new maintainer process because that's a white listing on packages, not on new packages. So they're going straight to the member process because that's more applicable in that case. So it's a case by case basis. What does this person want to achieve? What's their existing comfort level? I think you would need to have some involvement at the contributor stage before you get to the later stages, but where that sits and how long you have to do that depends very much on the situation. I fail at SQL, never mind. It's okay, I was failing at SQL yesterday. Just like on the screen, may it also have returned back to developers or to contributors? Yeah, as Gunnar points out. So the path to leaving is to go to emeritus and there is sort of a light weight coming back in. So if you're not active and you're sort of like, well I'm not going to give up the rights I have because I'm not using them. You can gracefully leave and become emeritus and then whenever you want to come back it's a much lighter weight process. You've obviously proved you know this stuff before. It depends how long you've been away that maybe there's some new technical questions we need to ask you, but in general it's a lighter weight process to come back. And definitely we much prefer people who don't have time for Debian anymore to stand up and say that rather than go completing this thing and not be GSDarn or work out whether or not they're still alright. Yeah, and there is that as soon as somebody knows that they're not going to be active in Debian for the next few months it makes sense to be either set oneself on vacation if one knows they're becoming back or become emeritus if one doesn't know when they're going to be coming back. Which really helps also reducing the attack surface of Debian because each active Debian member can log into every active into every Debian machine. So we really don't want someone to become inactive leave their computer somewhere because they don't even remember that they have access to Debian machines and suddenly their SSH key is somewhere. For the people who've been through the NM process recently how was the website? Was it understandable? I mean it was because you became Debian developer where there are things that weren't clear or same for people who advocate people for people who became Debian member if there's any feedback on the website something you didn't understand I would like to know. Has anyone in the room actually done an application for someone on the website? Steve, okay. Okay, good. Good, good. Okay. The website stuff is lovely much better than similar processes within a corporate situation in that way. Okay, well. Don't get me wrong. So I don't know who's been involved in the process in the past but previously there was a lot of manual tracking of what how far people were along in the situation it was a manual send an email with an application to a mailing list which works for some people but it's quite hard to track the progress of what's going on so the new website can really solve some of the problems about seeing things being active or things getting lost in the cracks by making it all trackable in one place I mean you can go and see what pieces are required if I can show you actually I can show you. I've been trying to automate everything that can possibly be automated so that everything that feels like bureaucracy would be kind of possible but automating bureaucracy may leave coroner cases out or something. Yeah, so this is the view I see as a front desk person and the really cool thing is that it tracks sort of all of the requirements so I can see that these people need something done with their keys Dave needs an AM assigned but then he's got a problem with his keys so that's why he hasn't got to that but it's very clear for me to go right this is where this process is and at the bottom I can see that Dave can have free slots so because it's all tracked in the website now you can actually walk through your process and you can see that Dave can see exactly which of his requirements he has and doesn't have and where he is in it and you can sort of go into the process and annotate a log and you can see your advocates and it's in one place and you can work out what's going on which wasn't the case before so if anyone who's been through the process maybe what, when did you move over you know he knows well process one was started June 2016 okay so we've had about just over a year of the new website and certainly from my perspective it seems to be moving along reasonably well and it is much easier to track where people are and who needs attention so if you've heard bad things about NM and that's put you off in the past please consider giving it a try and as I say we do contact Front Desk if you've got delays or problems or anybody's concerned based on that tale of woe I gave it looks like you've absolutely fixed it that's a much much better chart than a year ago yeah I mean those three are the people that are currently outstanding to be fair we did a bunch of stuff yesterday and the day before in order to get that but there were a handful of people I think there were four DDs who had keys added to the key ring yesterday and are just waiting for the DSA step and there's like about six or seven DMs yeah those three were not the only people in the cube because there's all those assigned to application managers yeah that's true those are the three that are sitting not waiting for an application manager so they're the ones that are actually we go to applicants hash well there I mean clipped in the open okay I just joined so please repeat the questions in the channel yeah okay so this is the stuff that's currently outstanding currently open once process so this is the list quite small from that so it's the process is currently open and it's not because of lack of AMs at the moment we actually have spare AMs these are people who are in the process of talking to AMs or some of them need keys so they're the if we look at Jeff just to pick at him because I can see him in the room this this yeah yeah so there you go so we don't count them against this but equally here on my list until it's actually sat on the new maintainer list for five days so it gives anyone a chance to sort of look at it and go hang on actually there's some issues or there's a chance for people who are active in the project to see a process when it starts before it actually gets kicked off properly unequally they'll need to go on advocate you can see he doesn't have any advocates because he's literally only checked on that so someone should sort that out for him I'm just trying to look at the other ones to see if there's anything obvious that there's a is anyone else in the room on that list you've been assigned an AM this morning it just happened I did promise quite frankly the process is getting better year on year on year but it's been largely due to a lot of the attention of people in this room particularly towards the front yeah Enrico says he doesn't like people saying good work Enrico's work on this website makes my job a hell of a lot easier for me now it's I can go and click and assign you an AM I can see who's free it streamlines the process it reduces the friction to me going in and as an AM checking where I am in the process as a front desk person progressing people throughout the process I know I can go and spend five minutes and do some useful work in Debbie when I've got them here and there rather than having to go I need a block of two hours in order to track down what's going on so yeah thanks I'm quite proud that until the intent and until these three are satisfied which means you say you want to become something somebody says I agree and you say you agree to do things in Debian until those three are satisfied there's no load on front desk because there's a robot that takes care of pinging and closing if nothing happens in two weeks that helped I just want to scroll down the page the process is closed in the last 30 days because that's kind of a bit more interesting because it does show that we're actually achieving stuff I don't think it's the list of outstanding stuff but it does show that a bunch of people have had their requirements closed because they didn't get as far as getting the advocate and everything so we weed people out whenever they don't get those steps so it doesn't eat into the rest of the process's time but equally there's a bunch of DEMs there's two uploading DDs that are in that list things are getting done hopefully is that public so these are the nm.org the only column that's not public and shouldn't be seen by anyone is FD comments where we may say this person is really bad but don't tell anyone but it's not really used actually you can impersonate someone I think to make sure that you are like a non front desk person impersonate someone if you click on that one Jeff I'm going to pretend to be you is that okay so yeah, so I'm not Jeff and if you've got applicants the FD comment column should be gone if it's not I hope so yeah so this is what you would see is a thing but you essentially see all that information except for the FD so you can log in and see how busy the process is where you sit and all of that stuff and just to go back to being as an applicant you see all of this so you can see missing requirements and you can see sort of the requirements at the bottom and whether they've been approved and where they are so you get this viewpoint as well as front desk which hopefully helps there's delays that you can sort of see where you are in the process it doesn't solve unresponsive people but it does let you know that there's some progress is anybody here looking for more guidance on do they want to be in deviant or what they gain from it or what they should be doing I've opened up one package so I thought what might be next steps is that through a sponsor yes do you have a regular sponsor or a regular involvement or you've uploaded it once or what stage are you at in this the person who invited me which got uploaded by someone else so what where that fits into your framework so that's certainly the precursor to deputy maintenance it would sound like the route you're going down for what it's worth was that through mentors yes so I'm told mentors is working reasonably well the initial stage of if you've got a package you want to upload and it's new and you need someone to sponsor your upload because you're not a deputy maintenance but I was speaking to someone yesterday who said there's actually a reasonably active group of people there who will pick up packages and upload it so that's definitely a good way to get started the idea would be that at some point you'll have worked with some people who feel you're doing good work that they're not checking your packages because you know what you're talking about and they will be able to advocate you for deputy maintenance which will then mean you have the right to upload that package by yourself and that I would imagine is the next step the person who did not live at mentors uses what worked directly from the packaging repo and that happens as well and that's, I mean there are a bunch of teams so I've seen people who are interested in particular areas go and find a team to get involved with which sort of puts you in the contributor bracket and then someone else will maybe worry about the uploads and then some of the team will sponsor you so for the package Perl for example which does Perl modules and Perl related things and there's equally there's Ruby and there's the common languages and there's package electronics I know has a team of people doing packages related to electronic stuff and you can get involved there contribute within that environment hopefully get some support from the rest of the team about how things are done and how they do things and someone else will worry about uploading it so that's a good way if you have a particular area of interest to get involved in that same thing generally if you're working together with other people in Debian at some point somebody will say why don't you get an account or if you're doing stuff or if you think you belong you can ask people how about they get an account the only problem we have is and it's a weird corner case is people who become Debian maintainers and spend five years maintaining those two packages and then they would say I would like to vote now and suddenly nobody's been working with them for the last four years and they can't find an advocate and I have no idea how to fix that so make sure that if you contribute to Debian you keep having some social network inside Debian which is a good idea anyway because you don't want to be in Debian alone if you want to have some friends that know what you can talk to turn up to that comment it's a very good subject to actually meet the people who are there question or comment I'd like to repeat myself creating plans or contacting to find a friendly environment and friends who sponsor and do something to get new members in Debian Meet we got one Debian developer per year because Debian Meet exists they convert this teams in Debian are a very good way of getting involved because it's easy to find sponsors it's easy to find people to talk to people who give you advice on when to do things so we have another question from IRC as well do we have a lack of clarity on when people should think of applying and it's a what we'd like to see at least I think as an AM is people shouldn't really be thinking of applying as a new member until you think you're ready technically the point of the advocate is to back that up and tell the rest of the project that they think you're ready technically as well we used to have a problem years ago and sometimes this view still holds but getting into new maintainer getting into new maintainer could take months and months maybe years so as soon as you can work out how to generate a PGP key you should apply the worst way possible we really want people applying into the new member process who are frankly already ready we're not trying to train people at this stage we're not expecting you to be waiting for years you should be ready and already have the skills it's now just a case of us verifying those skills I'd like to counter that slightly in that I've had some feedback from people who sort of view that they have to be absolutely on top of everything before they can start the new member process and have to know the answer to every question off the top of their head before they start the new member process that's absolutely not true yes you need to be absolutely comfortable with the project you need to feel whatever but I'm fine as an AM with people coming and saying I don't quite understand the question or I'm not quite sure I'm trying to answer it you know it's a conversation rather than a test it's a do you know your way around Debian and when you don't know the answer you know where to ask or where to look or both of these things and that's perfectly okay and equally there's some of the questions that sort of say make sure your packages are in good shape and again I've seen people say I'm waiting for them to be perfect I'm waiting for my packages to have no bugs and everything to be okay and it's like no make sure they're in decent shape make sure you're happy with them they're you know ready to ship as part of stable but software sucks it's not bug free ever you know you've always got bugs in your packages whether they've been found yet or not it's another issue so don't worry about that perfection thing about the process if you've got an AM who's being a real stickler and whatever then they're wrong and it should be a conversation and it should be something I mean I learn from every single new member I talk to they all have different views in the world than I do and I really enjoy having that conversation and I'll make people who I know no free software just put it in their own words for me so I can have the conversation which I admit slightly selfish and it does make the process a little longer but I'm not trying to test anyone I'm trying to have a conversation and I'm trying to do the social side of things so don't worry about knowing all the answers do you know feel comfortable in Debbie but you just need to know where to look and who to ask and sometimes when I said technically capable a chunk of that is also knowing when you don't know the answer but where to look it up how to find it so again question actually to me clarifying so what skills are we looking for before you get into new maintainer or say new member process basically do you have if you're looking to do package uploads do you know how to do those package uploads do you know how to manage your package do you know how to deal with bug reports that kind of thing and in general as a more broad attitude packaging or non-packaging whether it's a problem if you try and do something and look up how to do it later it's not a problem if before doing something that you've never done you are able to look up information ask around so make sure that you know what you're doing when you're doing it not necessarily when you become a Debian developer because Debian is too broad and as to when to apply now we had one minute left about one and a half minutes ago with regards to when to apply it's when you feel like you belong when you need it like you need to do NMUs for mass bug fixing you need access to some Debian machines to commit to web pages or something so yeah when you feel like you belong when you need it yeah if your current status in Debian is hampering your ability to get stuff done in Debian that's a pretty good sign that you should be trying to move to a different one and if you're going to come through and go I'm doing all this stuff and I'm having to ask someone else to sponsor all my uploads absolutely you know apply for a member or whatever or if you're dealing with a package that has a lot of churn and you're trying to get in a good shape and you have to ask someone to sponsorship then absolutely ask for Debian maintenance status if you ever find that where you're at in Debian hampers your ability to get stuff done that's too well it's a red flag about you definitely should be changing you can do it before that but if you ever get to that point absolutely come and talk to someone if you're not sure so Jonathan in ILC says that for him with an AM hat on is the thing he wants to know is does this applicant know when to stop and seek help because at that point he knows he can trust them not to just break things so of course Debian is a board church there are always many different ways of contributing and being a project member as there are people in it not everybody knows everything if anyone claims to know everything they are clearly lying to you do not trust them you know we work together fundamentally we all tend to find new stuff every day, every week whatever we don't know stuff and you go and work on things we will be totally hypocritical to expect new member applicants to be any different whenever somebody thinks they understand Debian will be destroyed and recreated more complicated than before I'd like to add to this how a Debian member for 90 years and I'm frequently showing up with Debian mentors to ask questions how to do the packaging absolutely also I think one comment to this show of unknowledge one of the things that keeps me most updated on the current users the current tools and so is to the way when applicants answer because they usually know things much newer than when thank you for what thanks folks if you do have any more questions there were plenty of people around to come talk to us I'm here all week Enrico Steve's here all week by all means grab me Ben my ear ask me questions