[gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Duncan]

Damien Levac posted on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:49:03 -0500 as excerpted:

> As an aside, which may or may not reflect the view of other potential
> candidates, even though I use git for my personal projects, having to
> learn CVS would not be an issue if I'm already willing to learn
> everything else. (However, if there is no guarantee that this will be
> useful, why is it a requirement in the first place?)

IMO, learning CVS shouldn't be a problem once people know they want to be 
involved in gentoo, once gentoo is on their short-list, so to speak. 
which generally means that people are gentoo users, thus being 
comfortable with gentoo and having it on their short list, before they 
become gentoo devs.  What concerns me is that a lot of folks may simply 
never be getting to that point.

Back when I was originally researching gentoo, it was not only for use as 
a user, which I became, but also with the idea that I wasn't interested 
in a distro that I wouldn't at some point be interested in contributing 
to, ultimately as a dev, should it come to that.  Back then, we were much 
closer to the whole zynot thing, and I did my due diligence there as part 
of my gentoo research.  I came to the conclusion that the poor guy must 
looking in a mirror and mistaking his own defects for those of others, 
DRobbins and gentoo in this case.  Kind of ironic how often that seems to 
happen, but it sure seemed to be happening there.  That's all water under 
the bridge now, but the point remains, I did that research because I 
wanted to be sure I was comfortable with gentoo enough to be proud to be 
identified with it, to the point of being a dev if it should come to it.

If I were doing the same thing today, I'd be doing my research, and well 
before I became a gentoo user I'd see this CVS thing.  Knowing what I 
know (or arguably simply perceive, possibly incorrectly) about how 
outmoded that technology is, I'd have gentoo crossed off my /long/ list 
even before I knew enough about it to properly consider it.  I strongly 
suspect I'd end up on arch.

Arch, it would seem, is where a lot of Linux users looking for a user 
customizable distribution that would have formerly ended up on gentoo, 
end up.  It certainly has the buzz that gentoo had back in the day, and 
that's been the case for some years now.

So my concern is that the people we're potentially losing due to CVS are 
being lost so early in their evaluation process that they're not even 
gentoo users yet, and for all practical purposes, we don't even know they 
exist or were a potential gentoo dev in the first place.


Meanwhile, my personal devhood blocker is the same as it was five years 
ago.  Apparently, IRC is a hard requirement.  At least the one final 
evaluation must be done on IRC.  But in that regard I guess I'm an old 
fogey.  I strongly prefer and function better with the async nature of 
email and mailing lists, and have enough negative experience with 
synchronous "instant messaging" type apps to know better than to subject 
myself to what is in effect the stress of a job interview, in an 
environment I already know I'm not at my best in.  It may be stupid 
objection, but it's a hoop I'm not jumping thru, at least not if there's 
not some potential for it to pay my bills on the other side.  And if it's 
so stupid and insignificant, that goes both ways, it's stupid to force 
such a stupid hoop-jump from what are after all volunteer recruits, when 
there's such a claimed developer shortage.  Either there is such a 
shortage and such trivial hoop-jumps should be cleared from the process 
as unjustified extra costs, or there is no such shortage, rather more an 
overage of candidates, and gentoo can afford to place such hoop-jumps in 
the process in ordered to help trim the list of candidates to some 
reasonable level.

So while I initially thought I might eventually become a gentoo dev (and 
did have several offers of mentorship), and used to feel a bit guilty 
about not getting around to studying for the quizes, etc, once I found 
out about the IRC hoop-jump, I decided I had better things to do with my 
time, and didn't worry about the quizzes, etc, any more, as that was now 
someone else's problem, not mine.

In a way it's sad, as I've outlasted a generation or two of devs by now, 
and expect I'll outlast a few more.  What might I have contributed in 
that time?  But as volunteers will, I've found other projects to 
volunteer my time and talent to, gentoo users have their own contribution 
to make too, and given how important IRC evidently is to being a well 
functioning gentoo dev (well, that, or there's enough of an overage of 
recruits that as I said they need a way to weed out a few), I couldn't 
have been happy doing it anyway, so it's good I found out before 
seriously getting into the quizzes, etc, wasting both my time and that of 
the recruiters.

So these days I don't worry about it, except to the extent it affects me 
as a gentoo user.  The dev stuff is clearly not a problem I need to worry 
about.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman