[gentoo-dev] Manifesto for council election

[Tony \\\"Chainsaw\\\" Vroon]

As you've seen, Chainsaw is on the list as a council candidate.
I use Gentoo in a professional capacity, as a UNIX systems administrator
for one of the largest internet exchanges in the world [1]. Right now, I
administer 42 machines running non-multilib hardened AMD64.
The topic of "Gentoo in the enterprise" surfaces from time to time on
the mailing lists, but the current direction that Gentoo is taking seems
to steer away from it.

Should you elect me to the council, I will do my best to discourage the
frequent usage of overlays. Not only can overlay ebuilds slip through
the QA net that is frequently trawled through the main tree (and they
often do), the ownership is not always clear. There is no central
location to report bugs in overlay ebuilds.
Last but not least, moving ebuilds out into overlays means that larger
deployments like mine are unable to use them.

One other problem that has appeared on my radar more then once lately. 
When developers lose motivation and stop committing to a package for
which they are the sole maintainer it can take a considerable amount of
time before this is dealt with in the form of a retirement bug or "last
rites" e-mail.
With a business dependency on some packages, that can be too long. I
believe we should actively seek out such packages and see if another
developer can be motivated to take the package over.
Failing that, I believe no ebuild is a fairer situation then an
outdated/stagnant ebuild with open bugs that are not looked at. Some
automated QA processes like the tinderbox already help with this but
without official recognition of these bugs as QA matters the full
potential of it goes untapped.

In writing this, I realise that some or all of what I have just written
may be controversial to you. Can I ask that you speak with your vote and
not in this mailing list.

Regards,
Tony "Chainsaw" Vroon

1: https://www.linx.net/about/index.html