On 03/18/2010 04:34 PM, Ben de Groot wrote:
> Recruitment being the bottleneck that it is (with candidates
> waiting many months), it is good to have another option
> for people who want to contribute.

If we do have a list of people waiting to get in, could we maybe publish 
this list somewhere, or instruct these people to look for 
maintainer-wanted bugs and offer their services as proxy-maintainers? 
Can we have some way of communicating that one of these almost-devs has 
written some ebuilds so that devs can work with them to get them committed?

This would get them a head-start and will give them VERY practical 
instruction.  For the devs that work with them they'll know that they're 
working with somebody with a long-term interest.  I'm not sure that we 
want a policy that states that when the recruits become devs that they 
will maintain these packages long-term, but it would be nice if they did so.

Perhaps the devs could also provide feedback to the recruiters on the 
recruit's strong/weak points so that they could work on these.  (NOTE - 
I'm not suggesting marking people for exclusion here - if somebody is 
fairly raw we want to work with them, but it doesn't hurt for the 
recruiters to know about that up-front.)

I realized that some of these ideas are still half-baked, but I'm 
wondering if there isn't an opportunity here.

Rich