[gentoo-dev] Making the developer community more open

[Daniel Drake]

"more open"? I can't think of a decent way to phrase the subject line 
which might make it sound it was coming from a native English 
speaker..ahem..anyway:

I read a complimentary comment from a Gentoo user recently (can't 
remember exactly where, so this is from memory). It was something along 
the lines of "Gentoo is great and will continue to be great for the 
foreseeable future. You have built the required structure to keep up 
with the rate of change in your environment (i.e. the increasingly rapid 
rate of development of open-source sofware)."
(if anyone can point me to where I read that, I'd appreciated it).

I think there's a lot of truth in that, especially the way that he/she 
highlights the fact that simply keeping up with what goes on around us 
is key to our "survival".

I won't go as far to say that I *don't* think we can keep up with our 
current "system", but I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

One of the bigger problems is that we have a huge user community who are 
keen on contributing, but we have such a high barrier for entry to the 
developer community. Quite rightly so - we're dealing with a live tree, 
so we can't give out commit access on the street.

At the same time, I feel that we're missing out. Comparing Gentoo with 
some other large open-source communities that I am personally involved 
in, I feel that we're too closed.

A developer recently compared Gentoo dev-ship to a marriage. In an ideal 
world, sure, we'd love for every single person who makes any kind of 
contribution to the project to become a full-time contributor who never 
goes AWOL or sleeps with another project. But more realistically, I 
think we need to become more open and flexible - as volunteers, people's 
interests change, some people will stop contributing after they have 
fixed whatever problem motivated them to contribute, etc. How can we 
handle this better?

We have a large expense on both sides when adding a developer to the 
project. I personally have lost developer candidates, undoubtedly more 
technically experienced than myself, who simply did not have the time to 
go through a month-long recruitment process which involved studying 
various documents not even relevant to the small area they would be 
contributing to. On the other side, it's a fair expense to add a 
developer to the project due to all of the 
quizzing/assessing/account-creating/access-elevation/...

Additionally, a significant percentage of developers who have joined 
recently have gone AWOL after a few months. That hurts us, given the 
expense we went through recruiting and adding them, and the time needed 
to reverse that and retire them.

I am not claiming this is an easy problem to solve - we do need to be 
especially careful that any changes made do not decrease the quality of 
commits to the live portage tree. This is why I am asking for help.

I'm looking for ideas - preferably big, drastic, shiny ones. Ignore any 
issues relating to migration away from our current system. What would be 
the _ideal_ way for Gentoo to handle contributions from anyone? (note 
that I'm dropping the user/developer community separation in that 
question, as the boundary between those could change in these ideas)
How would an ideal recruitment process work, if there would be one at all?

Please try and keep replies on-topic - I'm not trying to start a 
discussion/flamewar on the current recruitment system or anything like that.

To get you thinking, I suggest reading the section titled "Open 
Development Team" at 
http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=23200&seqNum=3
which is part of a (very good) larger article detailing why Linux kernel 
development works so well.

Any ideas?

Daniel
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