/me on the Debian Maintainers GR

After reading on Planet some opinions against the DM GR I made up my mind: I want to post in favour of the GR (and I've already voted accordingly). I swear I'll (try to) be brief.

My main point is: this is not an ugly hack to address the long unsolved problem of our sloppy NM queue, this another way of letting people contribute to Debian and acknowledge their work. Rationale follows.

Maybe it's just me, but in several year of DD-ness I've met on the net a bunch of people which are "just" interested in maintaining some packages in Debian. I've been training some of those people and of course sponsored their uploads. But if they aren't willing to enroll the NM queue, if they aren't interested in the other social/political aspects of the Debian project I can't blame them, it's their call.

I'm in Debian as a DD because I do care about other stuff than plain package maintenance, but I can't ask every hacker around there to share my motivations. Nonetheless I don't see any valid reason to reject and/or put extra artificial burden (i.e. life-time sponsoring) on the good technical work that such people can contribute to Debian. It's just a matter of identifying a new status for contributors that states "I'm contributing my package maintenance skills to Debian, and I'm proud of it", ... without implying full Debian zealot-ness The GR precisely addresses this need: establish this new status, the Debian Maintainer status. (We would need a whole bunch of similar new status for other kind of contributions, like translations and artworks, but this is an entirely different story, unfortunately not addressed by the DM GR)

And regarding the fear of decreasing package quality, the sponsoring process has already proven to be bugged in this respect: when they really want, sucking packages can enter the archive, they will find some sponsor. There's no silver bullet, our best hope is to establish social practices which encourage people producing (directly or not) good packages and discourage the others. In this respect the ability to stop accepting advocacies proposed in the GR sounds good to me.