Sponsors - who does (not) work on FE-NEEDSPONSOR tickets

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2015 10:50:55 +0200, Miroslav Suchý wrote:

> I was just watching the ongoing reports of want-to-be-contributors
> how hard is to get sponsored;

Yes, it's incredibly easy for Red Hat employees to get sponsored via
the "Become a co-maintainer" process:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_get_sponsored_into_the_packager_group#Become_a_co-maintainer

No need to contribute any reviews. No need to submit any package for review.
Fast sponsorship.

And yes, the same process _would_ work for all community contributors, too,
but not if people don't want to become a co-maintainer for anything.

> reports how Fedora
> Repository stalled [1];

> [1] https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/growth-of-fedora-repository-has-almost-stalled/
> 

Your script output does not tell anything at all about activity of all
packagers in the package collection, in the normal review queue(s), in
pkgdb. No clues about number of orphaned/retired packages. No clues about
semi-dead packages where the packager is absent for a long time, and the
package only gets rebuilt during mass-rebuilds or receives random rebuilds
by other people.

How many new packagers manage to include a single package in the collection,
but lose interest in maintainership afterwards? How many fellow packagers
lose interest in Fedora in general and switch to another distribution?

> discussion that we actually do not know how many active sponsors we have.

More interesting would be a discussion about which various fields of interest
the current sponsors cover. Ruby? MinGW? OLPC XS? Mono? Fonts? Scientific/Maths
related school/research projects software? To mention a few fields only.