Re: [gentoo-dev] Becoming a Gentoo developer?

[Kent Fredric]

On 18 April 2015 at 02:33, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> wrote:

> The problem is double effort: previously one developer effort was
> needed, now effort is doubled at least: reviewers must dig into
> details how submitted code works, test it and only then commit. Now
> remember that reviewers are also developers. This means that pull
> requests will hang for weeks, months, forever due to a lack of time.
> On top of all this thinks about maintainer-needed packages or
> packages that can't be categorised into some single project, e.g.
> *-misc categories.
>


You're aware of course this is a current problem, not a prospective one,
and that penalty is paid for every single contributor who doesn't have
commit bits.

This is where any shortage of staff compounds itself.

Just our tooling is currently really poorly optimised, and so there are
needless steps every developer must take to simply have the contibuted code
available to even compare.

I'm hoping with git migration we can find some alternatives that are less
taxing.

But the reduced opinion I have is a lack of progression between overlay
contributor and gentoo dev.  For instance, a single contributor may be
tasked with performing a large number of arbitrary and time consuming
simple steps on packages in a specific category, and the nature of their
chances might be that the aggregate of those changes can be reviewed
without need to review the individual diffs.

The individual will still be isolated from unsanctioned contamination of
the tree, and a trusted gentoo dev still makes the magic happen, so the
elements of our human costs are all still there.

But the tooling can make it more effective to review such differences by
aggregation.

-- 
Kent

*KENTNL* - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL