Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for April

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 22:19 +0100, Mike Auty wrote:
> Petteri Räty wrote:
> > Defining required amount of activity for ebuild devs. I would like us to
> > raise the required amount of activity for ebuild devs.
>
> Given that the low number of developers is ranked as our number one
> problem in Donnie's informal survey[1], taking any kind of action
> against infrequently-committing developers is likely to reduce the
> number of devs we have, and potentially make the problem worse.

It's about quality not quantity maybe?

> What benefits are you aiming to get from the suggestion?  I can think og
> keeping the books tidy and reducing management time required to maintain
> the devs.  Are there others I've missed?  If they're worth the
> cost/effort involved with putting someone through the dev tests and
> getting them trained, then it seems a good idea, but otherwise probably
> not...

Well I think in part is keeping up with changes within Gentoo. Since I
joined we have change the syntax and semantics of Gentoo Java ebuilds
allot. Lots of things wrt to ebuilds constantly change. So could be more
of your game. If your not keeping u[, you run the greater chance of
falling behind, etc.

The other side of that, and maybe it's part of the above suggestion, is
re-taking the quizzes. I have long thought, just like driving tests.
That maybe every so often existing devs should re-take the quizzes. The
quizzes do change at times. Much less if your skills are sharp, should
only take a few minutes if that.

( Mostly thinking of myself when I think about re-taking quizzes ;) )

I take it as an all around approach to increased QA. Possible motivator
for developer activity with some very reasonable minimum requirements.
Surely could have side effects, but not a horrible idea

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.
amd64/Java/Trustees
Gentoo Foundation