Re: [gentoo-dev] Becoming a Gentoo developer?

[Andrew Savchenko]

Hi,

On Fri, 17 Apr 2015 10:50:34 +1200 Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 17 April 2015 at 02:22, Bob Wya <bob.mt.wya@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> > Are you maintaining an overlay listed in Layman? If not then it's pretty
> > obvious that
> > you're just trolling the mailing list and wasting a lot of folk's time...
> >
>
>
> I'm not sure that's the case. Its easy enough to maintain an overlay. Its
> easy enough to get yourself into the primary permission bits to be major
> contributor to an overlay listed in layman.
>
> But that doesn't really make you a useful gentoo developer, its just a
> stepping stone.
>
> The barrier to entry to making useful changes to the CVS tree is presently
> several orders of magnitude more daunting than contributing to an overlay.

Nevertheless it is quite doable. And from my personal experience it
is definitely worth it. Before becoming a dev I had my own overlay
in layman for years. Training gives you a much deeper understanding
of both development process and community relations, this is like an
evolution to another step.

As for overlays, their function is important, but should not be
overestimated. In my vision main function of overlays is sandboxing.
Sandboxing in many aspects: for either packages too new or immature
to be added to the main tree; or for contributions from interested
users who are still not devs; or, perhaps, for packages with too
small target audience to care enough to put them to the tree.

I don't believe in talks about "high quality overlays". All
overlays I ever tried have lesser quality than the main tree,
though some are a bit lesser, while others are horrible. Of course
there may be exceptions, but I know none.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko