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

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi Daniel,

On 3/20/06, Daniel Drake <dsd@g.o> wrote:
> 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.

The two big problems are that non-devs don't know where to go to get
involved, and if they want to do more than just chat, there isn't
anywhere for them to go.

I've been very happy with using svn+trac overlays to bridge this gap. 
They provide a sandbox for contributions to be shared and evaluated. 
They provide a place where I've been able to give commit access to
non-devs, so that they can learn the ropes w/out threatening the
Portage tree proper.  They provide a place where people who just want
to write docs for a single package can contribute.

Overlays create a sense of participation that's lacking with Bugzilla
patch submissions.  Backed up with regular communication (I recommend
not recruiting anyone who won't spend time in the IRC channels, but
that's a personal preference), they help us get things done quicker.

The downside with overlays at the moment is that they're scattered
around the net, and if you don't know where to look they can be very
hard to find.  I've been talking with infra about providing
overlays.g.o as a central hosting service for herd and individual
developer overlays.  Infra have been very supportive of the idea.  I
just need to free up some time to get the service launched.

Best regards,
Stu

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