- DESCRIPTION:
TL;DR: Debian's web pages are hard to navigate and use and it's very hard to see what's happening.
I contribute to FOSS projects whenever I have time and have been wanting to contribute to Debian, but the difficulty is offputting. I'm used to searching for the program name and arriving at a portal page from which I can easily browse the source, see the current problems and instantly start interacting with the community. Unfortunately, contributing to Debian seems to require in-depth knowledge about many systems and arcane email commands. As a would-be contributor this completely alienates me.
One reason is that Debian has many independent services: lintian, mailing lists, manpages (which btw are fantastic and give me hope), Wiki, CI, alioth, the package listing, BTS, etc. To contribute, you need to learn most of them and For example, searching a package name gives me a page at packages.debian.org, but it's very hard to navigate or even discover the other services from there. I can't easily see if there are any lintian issues, critical bugs or current discussions. Additionally, I find most of the systems very hard to use (I still can't figure out the mailing list archives). Ideally, these services would be more tightly integrated.
Another big reason Debian is very hard to contribute to is the main discussion takes place via mailing lists. I understand that many people enjoy working with them, but for light usage they are a big pain. Submitting and history are in completely different programs, there seems to be no real threading, volume is often high and reading large amounts of emails is a chore to me. A solution here would be an improved mailing list archive with options for replying directly integrated to the site.
Generally I agree with most of the submissions, but this one is the most important.
I really love debian because of its principles (and I would love to contribute), but I feel that new contributors (like me) have problems because of the many (and some old) tools and outdated and non-friendly documentation.
Also, I don't know how many contributors come and stay, but even in unstable I see some outdated packages in weeks, and also some useful software that is not packaged.
As a parallel, one of the reasons Slack has won in the paid-chat stakes is because of it's buttery-smooth onboarding process. The chat client isn't anything special, really, but it's just so easy to get set up and running.
The difficulty gradient of onboarding is a significant contributor to attracting folks.
- DESCRIPTION: TL;DR: Debian's web pages are hard to navigate and use and it's very hard to see what's happening.
I contribute to FOSS projects whenever I have time and have been wanting to contribute to Debian, but the difficulty is offputting. I'm used to searching for the program name and arriving at a portal page from which I can easily browse the source, see the current problems and instantly start interacting with the community. Unfortunately, contributing to Debian seems to require in-depth knowledge about many systems and arcane email commands. As a would-be contributor this completely alienates me.
One reason is that Debian has many independent services: lintian, mailing lists, manpages (which btw are fantastic and give me hope), Wiki, CI, alioth, the package listing, BTS, etc. To contribute, you need to learn most of them and For example, searching a package name gives me a page at packages.debian.org, but it's very hard to navigate or even discover the other services from there. I can't easily see if there are any lintian issues, critical bugs or current discussions. Additionally, I find most of the systems very hard to use (I still can't figure out the mailing list archives). Ideally, these services would be more tightly integrated.
Another big reason Debian is very hard to contribute to is the main discussion takes place via mailing lists. I understand that many people enjoy working with them, but for light usage they are a big pain. Submitting and history are in completely different programs, there seems to be no real threading, volume is often high and reading large amounts of emails is a chore to me. A solution here would be an improved mailing list archive with options for replying directly integrated to the site.
- DISTRIBUTION: unstable
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Student