Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for April

[Richard Freeman]

Mike Auty wrote:
> So the still unanswered question appears to be, would we like Gentoo to
> have fewer packages and less choice but greater QA, stability and a feel
> of professionalism, or would we like to have more packages and choice
> but a worse QA record, make some mistakes, and have a more
> community-based feel?  If you're going to try to answer this question
> please be delicate with your repsonses, in the past I can recall
> developers leaving over exactly this divide...
>

Well, Gentoo is about choice, so why not be both?  We already have 
~arch/arch and overlays, and if the need really arose we could have more 
levels of QA.  Then everybody can have the level of bleeding-edge that 
they desire.

Maybe all we need is to make it easier to contribute to overlays and use 
overlays, and then have a moderately-higher general level of QA in the 
main tree, and then the highest level of QA for stable (particularly for 
system packages).  You could even have the opposite - maybe a 
super-stable overlay for stuff like server apps with backported patches 
that users could elect to take priority even over the portage tree.  The 
only real gap is a general facility for assigning priority for 
repositories (possibly on a per-package basis), and maybe a GUI for 
managing everything.

Regardless, as long as devs actually follow policy I don't see any need 
to boot them.  Maybe very long periods of inactivity should result in 
having accounts locked as a security measure (so that we don't end up 
with hundreds of ssh keys with commit access floating around who knows 
where).  Booting out lots of devs just takes a limited set of resources 
and limits them further.  If anything we want to find a way to let more 
people contribute in a significant way - not less...
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