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On Thu, 2022-06-16 at 18:06 +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote: |
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> A question I'd like the candidates to answer. |
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> |
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> What do you feel that Council can do to increase the contributions to |
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> Gentoo? |
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There's actually very little that Council can do, as a body. It's |
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something *we all* have to do, and Council's role here should be mostly |
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to provide the necessary support and guidance when it's required. |
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This is a really broad topic, so I'm going to try to keep it short: |
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1) Continue making a great distro. Let's be honest -- if people don't |
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find using Gentoo beneficial, we can't expect them to stay around |
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and contribute. |
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2) Make contributors feel appreciated. This is open source, the most |
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people can really expect from contributing is satisfaction. If they |
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don't feel their contributions are helpful and appreciated, they won't |
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be contributing for long. |
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That's just a start but with these two points satisfied, things are |
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going to steadily improve. |
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|
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> - how do you feel development velocity of Gentoo should be measured? |
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> - how do you feel technical debt of Gentoo should be measured? |
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I can't really answer these questions unless you define what is the goal |
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of measuring these. Without putting the measures in context, they'd |
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only be meaningless numbers. |
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> - how do we make it easier to get orders of magnitude more contributors? |
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We've already solved that via GURU. In my opinion, that's the best |
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thing since Sunrise, with the extra feature that we've learned from |
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Sunrise and designed GURU to be self-sustainable. |
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We've made a place where people can freely contribute, work together |
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and be satisfied with being able to share their work with more Gentoo |
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users than before. At the same time, they can learn more, improve their |
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skills and eventually become Gentoo developers — and we get that almost |
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for free which means we can focus more on making Gentoo a great distro |
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and working with people who are ready to take the next step. |
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> - how do we make it easier to do QA on significantly more contributions? |
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Again, this is in large part done thanks to pkgcheck. I mean, we |
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finally have a proper QA tool that's easy to use and fast enough. I've |
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recently tried it on jiji, and pkgcheck was able to do a full ::gentoo |
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scan in 1.5 min! |
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The next step is replacing the antiquated CI tooling with something more |
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sustainable; most notably, not relying on humongous git repos to |
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transfer data around. |
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> - what blockers do you perceive in the contribution processes, and how |
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> do you think they should be tackled? |
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In my opinion, the biggest blocker still remains developers' time. We |
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can't expect to meaningfully get more contributions if we can't |
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realistically merge them. Trying to take our more than we can handle is |
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only going to result in frustration among potential contributors, |
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and in the end it's going to be a loss to Gentoo. |
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This is also why we shouldn't be aiming for "orders of magnitude more |
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contributors" -- we should be aiming at steady-but-slow increase |
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in contributors, and the new contributors will be able to onboard even |
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more contributors. |
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-- |
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Best regards, |
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Michał Górny |
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