On Monday 22 August 2005 00:15, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> >Since we have time constraints ourselves, we understand potential
> >recruits may only have a few hours during one day of the week to
> >do Gentoo development, and that is Ok. However, if you don't
> >think you will be able to dedicate at least an hour or two a
> >week on average, I am not sure it would be profitable to invest
> >time and efforts in the mentoring process.
>
> I probably spend at least that much time *testing* open source software
> a week. Let's say half of Saturday for a start. But I test a variety of
> stuff, not just science packages.  How big of a leap is it from being a
> hard-core beta tester like myself to actually maintaining a package?

As Olivier said at least a few hours a week to dedicate to Gentoo would be 
enough, and it sounds as if you already do that. I myself do work in the 
scientific herd (mentored by Olivier) which was the herd I originally joined 
with, the AMD64 porting team, the KDE herd and the net-proxy herd. These are 
just the packages I tend to use a lot, or the areas I work in. Some I just 
maintain because I am a nice guy and find it interesting using new 
packages :)

The leap isn't too great from building betas, being involved upstream and 
keeping up with releases/bug hunting to becoming a developer. You need a good 
background in bash scripting, ebuild writing and the tools used to author 
ebuilds. You also need to prove a certain level of knowledge before you 
become a full developer - please take a look at 
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml and 
http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/devmanual/ for further details :)

I remember reading some of your bugs, and working through some R stuff with 
you previously. You don't have to limit yourself to just scientific 
applications if you become a developer.

One thing I hope to improve is communication with users and potential 
developers for the scientific herd. It would be nice to see a little more 
activity on the mailing lists and IRC! Freenode, #gentoo-science - there 
aren't many of us on there but we do idle on that channel amongst others.

Hope that answers a few of your questions - and if I got anything wrong I am 
sure some of the other developers will correct me ;)

Sincerely,

Marcus
-- 
Gentoo Linux Developer
Scientific Applications | AMD64 | KDE | net-proxy