[gentoo-proxy-maint] October 2020 status update

[Joonas Niilola]

Hey,

here's a little status update for the project. As the long-time
contributors may have noticed, we've had a period where processing
through pull requests took 14-30 days. Thanks for your patience. We
should now be back on track and every self-maintained and
maintainer-needed labeled pull requests should have been reviewed. If
yours received no attention, and has been open for at least a couple of
days, AND passes the CI check cleanly, please do send a ping in the PR.
We should be back at a regular phase where we can process every PR
within 5 days from now, at least for the time being.

New package PRs have been blatantly ignored. As informed in pretty much
everywhere possible, it's expected they first take a round through GURU
to receive initial feedback. And now we're in a situation where we can
*slowly* start pulling packages and their maintainers from GURU to
Gentoo. We've already done this to a couple of packages. For starters
our first candidates are based on their usefulness and popularity, and
let's see where it goes from there. Of course nothing is forcing you to
move your package to Gentoo if you like the freedom to commit by
yourself whenever you wish, and/or hate doing PRs. We still expect new
packages to be put in GURU primarily.

A couple of reminders for the end:
  - you can fix / bump any package in maintainer-needed without having to
become a maintainer for it.
  - we don't see notifications for projects other than proxy-maint, nor
can we really process them. If if your contribution gets ignored please
open a bug and link your PR to that bug using commit tags described in
your PR. Bugzilla is still the main channel for reporting bugs. I am
looking into processing PRs assigned to dead/inactive projects, and
overall keeping Github clean.
  - handle your bugs! At least communicate with the bug reporter, and us,
what your intentions are if you can not fix it immediately. We have
humongous amount of bugs open and when looking to retire inactive
maintainers, the most important factor is how many bugs are open and how
they are handled overall. I know some of the packages are a bit more
complex and can't be fixed immediately.
  - pay attention to the automated PR feedback! If a CI check reports a
failure, we tend to give you time to fix it. This means, we usually
won't return to it before the CI check passes. Also don't forget to
properly sign-off *all* of your commits!

When in doubt, don't hesitate to hop in IRC and ask guidance from
#gentoo-proxy-maint or #gentoo-dev-help channels. You can also reach us
via the e-mail alias proxy-mail@g.o.

Thanks for your interest, and contributions to Gentoo!
-- juippis