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

[Jean-Noël Rivasseau]

I totally second this proposal.

I think this would be especially great for small or rarely used packages. I
can think of at least a dozen packages that I'd love to see in Portage, but
they are not in the tree. Allowing for people that are not developers to
maintain easy or not crucial packages is a good thing. It would not require
much effort for these people (since some packages are updated like once a
year), and even if the ebuilds are of low quality, that would not be a big
problem (we could mark those ebuilds specially so that if we developers have
some time to spare, we can review them).

The only problem I see, like Anant mentionned, is that we would need to
restrict commit access to parts of the tree. Not sure if that is possible.

Elvanör

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Anant Narayanan <anant@g.o> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
> > vote on, let us know !  Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
> > Gentoo dev list to see.
>
> If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the
> possibility of including a new "post" in our developer base - the
> package maintainer.
>
> a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be
> lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. This serves a couple
> of purposes:
>        - Users might become more motivated to becoming a maintainer for
> Gentoo, since it would require less time and effort from their end
>        - Might reduce the number of orphaned packages we have in the tree
>
> b) Some existing developers might want to switch to this post, if they
> feel that package maintenance is all they really want to do with
> Gentoo. This has the advantage of requiring lesser time from their
> side, while not feeling the pressure of being "responsible". We
> already have arch-testers, so this will fit in nicely with our current
> development model.
>
> c) The actual developer post may be taken up by existing developers
> who make wide-ranging or significant changes to Gentoo, as a whole.
> Examples include: package manager development, eclasses,
> documentation; basically anything that would require a GLEP or commit
> access to the whole tree - you get the idea.
>
> Some of you may argue that we already have proxy-maintainers. That's a
> great idea, all I'm asking for is for us to formalize the position.
> Giving a proxy-maintainer an official acknowledgement will definitely
> attract more users to contribute. Meanwhile, developers can do
> innovative things that they really like without having to maintain
> packages just because of a formality. Giving package maintainers
> commit access to parts of the tree might turn out to be tricky though,
> this needs discussion with infra.
>
> I'd really like for us to think through this proposal - I strongly
> believe that this will improve the quality of Gentoo development as a
> whole, and reduce the number of open bugs and their turnaround times.
>
> Cheers,
> Anant
>
> P.S. As some of you may have already guessed, this proposal is based
> on Debian's approval of a similar position in their developer
> hierarchy last year: http://www.us.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003
>
> P.P.S. Maybe this is more suited for -project, but everyone knows that
> nobody reads that list :-p
> --
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>