Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council 2022-23: Questions for Candidates: how to increase contributions

[William Hubbs]

Hi all,

I've also been pretty busy this voting period, so sorry about that, but
I will attempt to answer these questions as well.


> On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 06:06:40PM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > A question I'd like the candidates to answer.
> >
> > What do you feel that Council can do to increase the contributions to
> > Gentoo?

This one is difficult because the council really doesn't control
contributions. I do think that we are heading into a good place for
this however. With the addition of gitlab, I think we can possibly make
it easier for folks to contribute.

Also, while the proxy maintainers project is a good thing, I would like
to see a push for proxy maintainers to become developers.

> > - how do we make it easier to get orders of magnitude more contributors?
> > - how do we make it easier to do QA on significantly more contributions?
> > - what blockers do you perceive in the contribution processes, and how
> >   do you think they should be tackled?

I agree with the sentaments about tooling already mentioned. Better
tooling would make things much easier.

This also includes keeping the stable tree relevant. I know for me, and
probably for a lot of maintainers, stabilization is a lot of work. I
think there needs to be a way (with opt out by maintainers of course)
that packages can be stabled automatically after 30 days in the tree.

> > Many of the developers I nominated in my previous email to the -project
> > list were because are the very prolific contributors or have significant
> > impact in their contributors: how can we increase not just the prolific
> > contributors, but get many more contributors everywhere?

Like I said above, I think one thing we should do is actively encourage
proxy maintainers to become developers.

I am hoping that the transition to gitlab will include moving all of our
work over there and not accepting prs from github. That way everyone
will contribute through the same workflow.

Thanks,

William