Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 02:37 -0700 schrieb Brian Harring:
> On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 11:16:32AM +0200, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> > Hell no, but ...
>
> Then avoid feeding the distrowatch trolls w/ sensational
> subjects please ;)

oh, well ;)

> > We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> > Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> > users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
>
> Got any metrics offhand?  The reason I ask is that I can't think of a
> time when 'understaffed' wasn't an applicable term.

Metrics are a problem and i'm pretty sure you won't get any somewhat
"correct" metrics as we have lots of herds which do have some developers
listed as herd members, who are mia for quite some time. Still when
considering herd members who did a commit to a package belonging to
given herd in the past say 4 weeks as active you won't get useful
metrics.

> Sidenote, if we *aren't* tracking the basics, it might be worthwhile.
> Shouldn't be too hard to grab the history of herds.xml for example and
> extract the relevant data.
>
> One thing to note... crappy support for something can draw people out
> to contribute.  Hence asking about metrics- I wouldn't be surprised if
> the headcount for misc. projects is a cyclic rise/fall.
>
> At the very least I'd be curious about the pre and post git metrics,
> once that conversion is finished up.
>
>
> > - Infra: One might get the idea our Infra team is just Robin (yeah, sure
> > there are more people, but ....) ... things are happening slowly (no
> > offend - I fully understand that those few can't dedicate more of their
> > spare time to infra work!), take overlays.g.o migration, Bugzie-3
> > migration and so on as an example.
>
> Relaying from IRC, overlays.g.o migration bits seem to be done...

Yeah, probably i had something wrong in mind. Nevermind. 

Tbh, my intention wasn't to discuss the _examples_ i listed, but to hear
all your opinions and ideas on where we do have problems and how to
solve them.

> > - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
> > someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
> > asleep.
>
> A status update on this one would be useful, even if it's just "got no
> time, here's what is remaining" so someone could jump in and help
> where possible.
>
> Personally I'd suggest trying to extract status updates from folk-
> it's more useful anyways to know what's needed to get various projects
> done.

Yeah, status updates++ ... at least active projects/herds (like what
Robin said about Infra) would be considered more active then :)

- Tobias

-- 
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