About the recent blogs on planet debian about debian maintainers, I guess I have a couple of comments also.
About me: I am currently in "waiting for DAM" stage. I have been 10 months getting there and has now waiting for 6 weeks there. Looking at the DAM queue, people have been waiting in more than 6 months.
What would make the process faster for me ?
Getting processed by the DAM – and then the keyring maintainer is the obvious answer.
A thing that would have made my 10 months at AM stage shorter would be if the "reward" for getting the AM stage done wouldn’t have been queueing in maybe to 6 months. It wasn’t like the most motivating factor for answering my AM. The fact that it took 10 months is mostly my own fault.
So what am I trying to say here? Fix it it at the DAM stage (and maybe at the keyring stage also) and see people becoming DDs faster. Without lowering the barriers – except the barriers for the ability to stand in a queue.
Debian Maintainers seems mostly like a ugly hackaround this. And I kind of find my self being in the target group for some of the use of Debian Maintainers.
– and I am eagerly waiting getting processed in the DAM queue.
And back to development
Who wants to test & fix kdm on sparc ? (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=433801)
Also speaking as someone who has just arrived in DAMnation (3 weeks and counting) I totally agree. I took 33 days to complete AM, mostly due to my AM being away at several conferences. It should have taken under a week. Looking at the current waiting-for-AM and waiting-for-DAM stages they both look like ~6month waits; definitely things I think need fixing.
I agree that there should be a reasonably high bar to becoming a DD, but once you can pass that bar; a year of waiting for the sake of waiting is enough to put most people off.
On DM; it’s not a replacement to fixing NM, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not still useful.