Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
> On Monday 22 August 2005 08:48, C Y wrote:
> 
>>Perhaps we could have a "support team" behind someone with official
>>Gentoo developer status - people could point out significant ebuilds
>>with most logic in place to the developer, help work out quirks in the
>>programs/ebuilds, and generally speed things up?  Certainly the
>>developer would bear final responsibility but this way those of us with
>>five hours every month or so could help out too, particularly for
>>specialty packages.  (BTY, if some genius could figure out brl-cad I
>>would be grateful - it's going to take me a year at this point :-/.)
> 
> 
> I was wondering myself if some people in here might be receptive to the idea 
> of a support team, much like the arch testers we have for the amd64 porting 
> team. It often leads on to people becoming devs, but is a great way to help 
> out when you can.
> 
> Tony Murray is filling that kind of role unofficially with all the work he 
> puts into the boinc and setiathome ebuilds, whilst I review, test, improve 
> and commit them once they are up to standard. I also have good contact with 
> the quickplot developer who has integrated my patches upstream and helped 
> significantly with the ebuilds for that package.
> 
> I think these relationships are important, and I personally nurture them as 
> much as possible. Many scientific packages are very involved and having 
> people help test and work out problems can significantly increase our 
> efficiency as a team.
> 
>>There are a fair number of at least partial ebuilds for useful
>>scientific software stuck in bugzilla - brl-cad and acl2 come
>>immediately to mind, and I know there are others.  Plus a fair number
>>that don't have ebuilds where it would be useful to have them.  Gentoo
>>is alreay one of the best for scientific software, due to compiling
>>things being easy and our ebuild pool, but we could definitely do
>>better.
> 
> 
> The problem comes down to manpower and a need to recruit some more people to 
> the team. Having a support team similar to the arch testers could certainly 
> help in our case if those people were not ready to become devs/didn't have 
> the time. Once a package has been committed they would also need to help with 
> version bumps and fixing bugs with the new packages ideally.
> 
>>My machine is probably a poor test machine - what gentoo environment
>>would we need to maintain?
> 
> 
> Just an up to date Gentoo install is fine. If you are testing some more 
> experimental stuff (I test new baselayout, glibc, gcc and other core stuff 
> sometimes) then a chroot might also be adviseable. Scientific apps just 
> require an up to date system.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Marcus

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