Re: Facilitating user contributed ebuilds (Was: [gentoo-dev] The future of the Sunrise project)

[james]

On 06/10/2016 10:09 PM, konsolebox wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 8, 2016 at 11:53 PM, james <garftd@×××××××.net> wrote:
>> The grandiose-ness you propose should only come upon graduating from proxy school, imho.
>> user-->strong-users-->proxy-->dev pathway.
>
> Pedantic, bureaucratic, procedure-oriented, monolithic, restrictive.
> Too conservative.

Funny, this seems like a warm complement, not a criticism or deficiency.


> What matters is the contribution, and the result.  If you don't like
> how a user makes a contribution, don't accept the pull request, or
> don't merge his package.  Simple.  If you think that could turn out to
> be just a waste of time for them, help them correct their issues; add
> some documentations to enlighten them and give warnings about wrong
> practices so they don't blame anyone, and so they can decide whether
> they would want to contribute or not given the rules presented; but,
> _don't_ make the steps mandatory.  Don't make contributions
> restrictive.

Security is out the window with what you propose, so you will only 
attract a subset of folks to your beliefs, imho.


> We do already allow people to send pull requests to
> Gentoo portage's repo in Github, but it seems like they generally only
> allow patches that fix current packages, not new features or new
> packages.

Yes, do mostly to a lack for formal documentation on howto do those 
things, imho.

You miss the point. Your way is but one pathway. Go forth and create it,
alone or with a dev, as you do not need help. Me, I'm a simpler, sort of 
a monkey-see monkey-do type of hack. I like to read and find formalized 
documentation, augmented with examples, of great comfort and confidence. 
It keeps the trains rolling along the same track, in a very productive 
manner.

> That's the very reason why I didn't like becoming a dev.  The system
> is too conservative and old-school for me.  I avoid projects where
> collaboration is mandatory.  I prefer contributing to a project with
> open and loosely knit arrangements, and a dynamic system.  Rankings,
> team bonding mean nothing.

You are confusing issues. There is a multitude of folks I've encountered 
over the years that are gentoo-lone-wolves, most have an extraordinary 
levels of competence and do not require interaction with gentoo proper. 
Many like the solace, so there is nothing precluding you from utopic 
gentoo. You are all ready there, aren't you?

/usr/local/portage + github mastery and you do not need the community, 
right?

I do appreciate your input and all the other input. I'm just looking for 
a different pathway, where I can read, and find answers, at my own pace. 
A formal set of documents does provide the gentoo devs/council control 
over what folks learn along the way to dev status and prevents the same 
questions from being asked, over and over and over again. Ad-hoc forums, 
such as irc-proxy and mail-reflectors have poor QA attributes over time, 
imho. QA in those mediums is labor intensive.
Those sorts of mediums are great for unique and non-standard needs.
Documents are king for routine and basic questions that are often seen,
evidence by the myriad of howto's, FAQ's and such documents in existence.


So my conclusion is to just post proxy centric questions, to gentoo-user
and all other questions along the pathway from user==>dev. If docs are 
parsed out and formalized/standardize from the archive, then that would 
be a good thing. If not, I guess folks can use their own filters to 
search out random answers to the (50-500) common questions along that 
pathway.

Good/Bad idea, posting proxy-maintainer questions to gentoo-user?
(recall irc does not work for me). Also, it might just spur on other 
users to create/maintain a few packages in their own area of interest.

> konsolebox

James