Questions about proxy-maint (Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers)

[Kent Fredric]

On 27 December 2012 05:39, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@×××××.com> wrote:
> It could actually be just the Proxy Maintainer workflow is not clear enough,
> or simple enough, and that we need more push towards a more heavy
> proxy-maintainer based system ( I don't know, I'm ignorant to too much of
> proxy-maintainer-ship stuff,  to discern /why/ that is might be difficult,
> but I'd imagine my ignorance is part of the problem )

Ok, after a bit of twitter, it seems part of my problem is I am just
more comfortable, at least, in an initial recruitment scenario,
working in a semi-proxy maintainer scenario.

I like having other people review changes and soforth, and I like
having a layer of protection between me and fuckery, and going from 0
to "Can cause damage to CVS" is not something I'm fond of.

And possibly, I can be helpful via the proxy maintainership avenue,
and maybe more traffic going that way could be helpful.

However, I note a problem of sorts:

http://www.gentoo.org/  => http://i.imgur.com/o0BqO.png

Nothing here really goes towards proxy maintainership, and if proxy
maintainership is a introduction to possible dev status, it really
should be more forth coming.



ie: It really requires research to even know that there is such a
concept as a "Proxy Maintainer" within Gentoo, and even then, looking
at gentoo.org doesn't really give an obvious answer. Sure, you can
fire up Google and type "Gentoo Proxy Maintainer" and get

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/proxy-maintainers/index.xml

But by then, you already know what you're looking for.

But even then, looking at that page, I have questions / confusions
that should probably be clarified / written on that page.

How does the proxy maintainership "work" exactly?
How do changes get pushed to the tree?
What tools do I need to use?
What can I do at my end to set up an optimal setup for contribution?
ie: Do we need an anoncvs checkout and submit changes as patchfiles?
And what really is the scope of proxy-maintainership?
ie: What about people who can assist with >1 thing, ie: a category
such as dev-perl/ , or maybe people have skills with x11-*/* but can't
commit to fulltime dev
Where can I see the current activity of other proxy maintainers to get
a feel for it?

Essentially, the more that can be known up front, so we can do
something, *before* contacting proxy-maint@ , the better, because then
we can do something, and have stuff ready to present when contacting
proxy-maint@ , instead of the inverse, having to contact proxy-maint@,
and essentially wait for a response, and then get started ( somehow)
based on that response, which basically boils down to waiting for
permission to think about contributing.

If participating/contributing to the proxy-maint project can be done
without emails/direct chat* , then the barriers to contribution are
lower

* for the sake of my example, bug reports really don't classify the
same as "direct chat", by direct chat I mean informal unstructured
conversation, "bugs" and "pull requests" and so-forth are very
explicit and categorized and things don't get lost or confused in
quite the same way they tend to do with direct chat.