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

[Alec Warner]

m h wrote:
> I'm not a gentoo dev (just a satisfied user), but I lurk on this list.
>
> I was at PyCon last month.  I would estimate that about 40% of the
> people there ran linux on their laptops.  The most popular distros
> were gentoo and ubuntu.  (Not this is not a scientific study, just my
> observations from talking to people there).  While I was there the
> person next to me starting hacking the ebuild classes to handles eggs
> (so he could emerge turbogears).  I talked to at least 3 others who
> were running gentoo.   I asked all of them if they had worked on
> portage.  Most said "No, the code is a little scary".  (I'll concur
> with that sentiment, as the code doesn't feel very pythonic).
>
> If you want to attract more developers (python people), a few things are needed:

That depends on how they contribute, I personally don't want random
python master bob contributing pieces to portage itself.  Portage things
are not necessarily as simple as people make them out to be.  Even
developers who know the code well make mistakes in adding and removing
code.  As solar once pointed out "the only man I trust to touch the
resolver is Jstubbs."  I realize thats a bit elitest...but at the same
time...I am overly cautious ;)

However we always accept patches and I think we get most of them
critiqued, sometimes it may take an extra prodding mail or two.  We
usually don't implement your features for you though ;)

>
>  * Portage documentation.  How the innards work.  There is very little
> docs/comments in the portage code

Someone has to write them; I have some of it done, it's been a longtime
project that I've worked on off and on; I actually had more done last
year and I know kutsuya did some as well.  However these are not
particularly interesting..and no one wants to document the 2.X branch.

>  * Unittests - without this how do I know that my change to portage
> didn't break someone else's corner case
No one is writing unittests for the 2.X branch
>  * Refactoring into a more pythonic style.  Note that this is pretty
> hard without unittests.
See above :)

>
> Take this as a grain of salt, from an observer, who believes that
> there are a lot of potential users (who know python), and who could
> easily contribute, if the bar was lowered a bit.  (Or steps were
> provided to reach a little higher ;))
>
> -matt
>