[gentoo-dev] Re: Making the developer community more open

[Dan Meltzer]

Asking developers to "proxy" takes almost as much time as it does to
ask them to maintain a package by themselves.  The developer is
directly responsible for anything he commits, so he will have to still
test the ebuild, still test any revisions, and still follow the
package to make sure there are no problems.  The writing the ebuild
part of the process is not that much of the commitment, I don't see
the point.

On 3/22/06, Thomas Cort <linuxgeek@×××××.com> wrote:
> > > A developer could then take these ebuilds, make sure they
> > > don't do anything malicious, or break QA, or whatever, and act as the
> > > bridge between the portage tree and the users actually working on the
> > > ebuild and keeping things up to date and working.
>
> > The easiest way to handle "contrib" as far as that "big warning" is to
> > make it a separate tree.  That way, folks who want the flexibility get
> > it, but those who prefer not to "risk it", don't  have to worry about it.
> > As well, contribs becomes another fertile developer recruitment ground.
>
> Why would the packages need a "big warning"/overlay/eclass if they
> were checked by a developer to make sure they "don't do anything
> malicious, or break QA, or whatever"? There are many user contributed
> ebuilds that have made their way into portage after being reviewed by
> devs that don't have any such warnings.
>
> I don't think creating a "contrib" overlay as an official part of
> Gentoo would be a good idea because making it an official Gentoo
> project conveys a certain level of quality. If the quality is there,
> then why not add the ebuilds to portage in the first place? If the
> quality isn't there, then you will have a lot of unhappy users
> complaining that an official Gentoo overlay broke their system.
>
> Having a non-Gentoo sponsored contrib overlay wouldn't be a good idea
> either IMO because the contributors wouldn't be contributing to
> Gentoo, and they wouldn't be interacting as much with the Gentoo
> developer community. Sure they would learn a lot of the skills
> required to be a Gentoo developer, but they wouldn't be increasing the
> value of anything in portage (unless they got a proxy to commit some
> of their work to portage). Also, there are many overlays out there
> already. Adding another one won't help with "making the developer
> community more open". Additionally, I don't personally know of a lot
> of people who actually use third party overlays except to get an
> ebuild for a particular package they want or to beta test ebuilds.
>
> -Thomas
>
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