Re: Notify people about empty herds (Was: Re: [gentoo-dev] FTR: media-optical@g.o has no developers)

[Ben de Groot]

On 4 June 2010 00:55, Jeroen Roovers <jer@g.o> wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jun 2010 22:35:04 +0200
> Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> wrote:
>
>> Also, there are herds that have several members, but none of them is
>> really active (games, most of the desktop-* herds, etc.). This also
>> leads to users being discouraged because the bugs they file are left
>> ignored.
>>
>> This needs a structural solution. I think we need a team to
>> systematically look at open bugs and to notify the community of such
>> problematic herds. I imagine this would be a QA subproject.
>
> That would basically be a task other than bug-wranglers, but jakub used
> to do all this and I do it sometimes, among a few others who either
> just scratch an itch or take a general interest. Maybe the
> bug-wranglers project can be extended since it at least has some active
> people (not just developers), but as it now stands there are again 150
> unassigned bugs after only a week (up from ~40 since the last
> reassignment run I believe).

This is indeed not bug-wrangling. It's more "follow-up", making sure
things don't fall between the cracks *after* they have been assigned.

Because currently they do. Instead of involving more users with
development, we discourage them because their bugs are ignored.
Especially users who come with fixes and patches should be thanked and
encouraged. But too often they are frustrated because their bug is
assigned to a dev or herd who is inactive and unresponsive (for
possibly very valid reasons) and nobody is picking up the slack.

I think we can do better, and I believe there are enough people who
care, who would volunteer to form a team to take care of this.

> "Calling in" QA as such usually isn't really beneficial.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough on this point. I'm not "calling in"
QA. I say we need to form a new team to tackle this long-standing
problem. Like bug-wranglers, these volunteers would not need to be
devs, but could just as well be users who want to contribute. And they
could be joined by devs, who like me think this is an important issue
to address.

I think that this new team would naturally find its place within
Gentoo as a QA subproject, as this problem has a lot to do with QA
concerns. But it could also be linked to bug-wranglers or be
independant. That's mostly bikeshedding for me. I think some QA
supervision might be beneficial, especially since QA has the authority
to step in in certain cases. But let it be clear that I'm NOT saying
"this needs to be done, and QA must do it." I'm saying "this needs to
be done, and we should ask some people to volunteer."

>> Then we also need some structure to redirect some dev love to these
>> problematic areas. We need to advertise these needs more, to get
>> trusted users to proxy-maintain. We need to streamline the recruitment
>> process to make it easier for people who want to volunteer to become
>> devs. And I could go on for a while. There are a lot of areas where
>> Gentoo has a lot of room for improvement, and they all interlock.
>
> All these problems seem to come down to the fact that we're
> understaffed in most departments.

I think we can work on this from two sides:

1: Motivate the people we have. Make their work more efficient. Find
out why people are retiring. For people who are retiring for
Gentoo-internal reasons, let's improve things so they will be more
motivated to stay.

2: Make it easier and more rewarding for people to start contributing.
We can expand proxy-maintainership (many users don't even know this is
possible). We can reform the recruitment process, so that it will be
less of a bottleneck (for example by putting much more responsibility
into the hands of our mentors, like we discussed on IRC). We also need
to communicate better what we need. Put specific recruitment calls on
our frontpage, on the forums. More actively engage contributing users
(on bugzilla, sunrise, etc.) to set the next step.

> Setting up yet another project isn't going to help much.

Not by itself. But in my opinion this is a structural problem that
needs a structural solution. If you have other ideas of how to do
this, let's hear them and discuss them, and find out which we think
are likely to give us the best results. My concern is that we tackle
the problem. The how is just a tool.

> Just looking
> at open bugs (bugzilla can help you figure out which bugs might need
> someone's particular attention). What might help right now is look at
> the herds.xml data and combining that with activity rates of the
> developers in all herds. Herds with few developers and lots of open
> bugs is something you could calculate and filter down into a monthly or
> weekly report you send to a mailing list (probably dev-announce?).

Yes, this could be a very valuable tool.

>> I believe we need to formulate a vision of what we want Gentoo to be,
>> and then develop strategies of how to get there. Having a team that
>> systematically looks at the state of herds as well as open bugs is
>> --in my opinion-- a crucial first step to adress some of the
>> structural problems that have plagued Gentoo for years.
>
> Do you mean we should redefine what Gentoo is about, to satisfy the lack
> of active developers? Bring down the number of packages? Or address the
> staff shortage? That last one is rather old, as recruiters have been
> clamouring for help for years now.

Not so much redefine, but clarify. What is Gentoo really about? What
kind of distro are we? What are our goals? What are our values?

We want to be the best distro for power users. At least, that is how I
have always understood Gentoo. What else is part of that vision? Can
we put that into a clear mission statement, into defined goals and
values?

This is going a bit off-topic. Maybe we should split this part off
into its own discussion?

A clear vision and defined goals will show us what our priorities are.
And in my vision for Gentoo nothing falls between the cracks. So it
would be a priority to detect those cracks, and to recruit volunteers
to close specific holes. If we agree on what our priorities are, on
what our goals are, we have a better change to succesfully attain
them.

Cheers,
Ben