Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFD] Adopt-a-package, proxy-maintenance, and other musings

[Daniel Campbell]

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On 01/18/2016 09:44 PM, NP-Hardass wrote:
> With all of the unclaimed herds and unclaimed packages within them,
> I started to wonder what will happen after the GLEP 67 transition
> finally comes to fruition.  This left me with some concerns and I
> was wondering what the community thinks about them, and some
> possible solutions.
>
> There is a large number of packages from unclaimed herds that, at
> this time, look like they will not be claimed by developers.  This
> will likely result in a huge increase in maintainer-needed packages
> (and subsequent package rot).  This isn't to say that some of
> these packages weren't previously in a "maintainer-needed" like
> state, but now, they will explicitly be there.
>
> A possible approach to reducing this is to adopt some new
> policies.
>
> The first of which is an "adopt-a-package" type program.  In
> functionality, this is no different than proxy-maintenance,
> however, this codifies it into an explicit policy whereby users are
> encouraged to step and take over a package.  This obviously
> requires a greater developer presence in the proxy-maint project
> (or something similar), but, personally, I think that a stronger
> dev presence in proxy-maint would be better for Gentoo as a whole.
>
> The second policy change would be that maintainer-needed packages
> can have updates by anyone while maintaining the standard "you fix
> it if you break it" policy.  This would extend to users as well.
> With the increased ease that users can contribute via git/github,
> they should be encouraged to contribute and have their efforts
> facilitated to ease contributions to whatever packages they desire
> (within the maintainer-needed category).
>
> Similar to the concept of a "bugday," coupled with above, an
> "ebuildday" where users and devs get together so users can learn
> to write ebuilds and for devs to work together to maintain packages
> that usually fall outside their normal workload could prove
> beneficial to the overall health of Gentoo packaging.
>
> Once again, these are just some random musings inspired by recent
> events on the dev ML, and thought it might be worth discussing.
> I've cc'd proxy-maint as a lot of this discussion is likely to
> involve them, and would like them to put in their official opinion
> as well.
>
>
>
I like the idea behind this, but as others have already indicated,
there are some potential downfalls or redundancies. I think the
biggest problem here is, to my knowledge we don't have a way to see
how popular packages are. We don't know where to direct effort in the
tree without bugs or complaints over IRC/fora/ML. To get that
information we would need either volunteers or to violate our users'
privacy, which I'm not in favor of.

So we have maintainer-needed and proxy-maint, which from what I can
tell is a good gateway to becoming a developer. We could bring more
attention to that, but not without some support from other developers
who have an eye for spotting people who would be an asset to Gentoo.

As mgorny said, it does no good for us to assign dead packages to a
group of developers that won't give them the attention they deserve. I
know I'm guilty of it.

For better or worse, that's the nature of volunteer work. Users need
to know that Gentoo's tree is only as rich as the time and effort that
can go into it. We all have limitations on our time and energy, and if
nobody's interested or capable enough to maintain packages, then it
only makes sense to let them sit until someone comes along and either
takes the package or treecleans it. Last rites exist to ensure that
anybody who might care about a package will step up. They get 30 days,
iirc. I think that's plenty of time.

Since the tree's in git now, a user or would-be developer who wants to
revive a package still has something to work with. They'll just have
to fetch it from history, update it, and submit a PR or New-ebuild bug.

I guess what I'm saying here is I like your idea. I just don't think
we have the manpower or the interest among our users to make a big
dent. We should maybe put a *little* more attention on proxy-maint, if
they're okay with that, and let the community speak for themselves. If
packages die, it's because no developer wants to or can maintain it
and nobody in the community wanted to step up. Those that care can put
them into an overlay or step up and contribute.

My apologies if I'm coming off harsh. I don't mean to; it's just the
way FOSS development works imo.
- -- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net
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