[gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Michał Górny]

Hi, everyone.

I'd like to re-heat a worrying topic. More than once I've noticed that
some projects in Gentoo are either completely defunct or seriously
undermanned. This has been already tackled via the herd->project
conversion but the problem still exist and I'd like to try to solve it
better.

According to a quick grep, we have 175 teams defined right now. With
a quick grep, I get the following histogram:

  Members   Teams
        0       3
        1      36
        2      34
        3      19
        4      20
        5      22
        6      12
  ...

Besides the first two numbers, it doesn't look that bad. However, most
of the time the number of members does not map well into real activity.

I think some of the projects could really do with just new members.
However, not having active developers on the project makes it hard for
someone to actually issue a call for members.

I'm thinking of mailing every project in Gentoo (i.e. mass-mailing 175
projects, some developers will get a lot of mail). The mail would
contain some descriptive text and a list of project members. It would
serve two goals:

1. asking the project to verify its member list (some people still don't
keep their wiki up-to-date),

2. asking the project if they need me to send a call for members.

Projects that are entirely fine could reply with a simple 'ACK'. Others
could ask for help directly. Those who don't reply will be brought to
further consideration.

What do you think? Would you mind getting that amount of mail once?
Any other ideas?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny