Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Matt Turner <mattst88@g.o>
To: Gentoo project list <gentoo-project@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council 2022-23: Questions for Candidates: how to increase contributions
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2022 21:42:56
Message-Id: CAEdQ38EfA1GrjnUtBgTedXnvekWHSjfpz=S_ZJZv0oX3-G07ng@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council 2022-23: Questions for Candidates: how to increase contributions by "Robin H. Johnson"
1 On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 2:06 PM Robin H. Johnson <robbat2@g.o> wrote:
2 > A question I'd like the candidates to answer.
3 >
4 > What do you feel that Council can do to increase the contributions to
5 > Gentoo?
6
7 Continue encouraging tooling improvements. Our tooling has improved by
8 leaps and bounds in recent years:
9
10 - app-portage/iwdevtools for all kinds of useful QA checks
11 - app-portage/gentoolkit's merge-driver-ekeyword for automatically
12 handling rebase conflicts in KEYWORDS
13 - app-portage/mgorny-dev-scripts for lots of useful scripts
14 - app-portage/nattka for stable and keyword requests
15 - app-portage/pram for applying GitHub PRs
16 - dev-util/pkgcheck for static analysis checks
17
18 In the same vein, we need to deprecate inferior tooling (like I
19 proposed and Council approved with app-portage/repoman). Too much time
20 is wasted correcting mistakes that e.g. repoman doesn't catch that
21 pkgcheck does. Too much time is wasted fixing mistakes that would have
22 been caught with pre-push CI (that Gitlab could provide in the
23 future).
24
25 But we still would stand to benefit from other improvements. I'd like
26 to make a tool that emails maintainers monthly with a summary of
27 things like
28
29 - list of maintained packages that have newer versions available
30 - list of maintained packages that are ready for stabilization
31 - list of bugs assigned to the maintainer
32 - maybe something about the last time the maintainer touched a
33 particular package
34
35 I think this would go a long way to resolving some issues I've seen in
36 Gentoo, where developers don't remember that they are the maintainer
37 of a package, or they don't notice that there's a newer version
38 available, or that it's time to stabilize one of their packages, etc.
39 These situations often end up blocking the work of more proactive
40 developers.
41
42 > - how do you feel development velocity of Gentoo should be measured?
43 > - how do you feel technical debt of Gentoo should be measured?
44
45 I don't think the answers to either of these questions is particularly
46 instructive.
47
48 For development velocity, I guess https://www.openhub.net/p/gentoo/ is
49 at least interesting—particularly the number of contributors ("Up + 28
50 (4%) from previous 12 months").
51
52 > - how do we make it easier to get orders of magnitude more contributors?
53
54 I don't think aiming for order-of-magnitude increases in contributors
55 is a realistic goal. We've been within ±10% of 200 contributors
56 (according to the OpenHub data) for the last 5 years.
57
58 Gaining contributors is important though, and I think the most
59 significant thing we can do here is to foster a community that people
60 enjoy being a part of. The last few years has seen an exodus,
61 voluntary and otherwise, or some rather antisocial characters. I think
62 Gentoo is significantly more fun as a result.
63
64 > - how do we make it easier to do QA on significantly more contributions?
65
66 Gitlab. See below.
67
68 > - what blockers do you perceive in the contribution processes, and how
69 > do you think they should be tackled?
70
71 Getting Gitlab going on Gentoo's infrastructure is in progress, and I
72 have high hopes for it to provide significant benefits—including
73 reducing the barrier to entry for contributors; at the same time I'm
74 concerned about our infrastructure team's capacity to support it.
75
76 Generally speaking, my most significant concerns about Gentoo are
77 related to the infrastructure team's capacity to handle issues that
78 only it can handle (or has permissions to handle). There are many
79 ideas for improvement and/or requests that have languished for years.
80 A few that come to mind from the top of my head:
81
82 - Forums migration (was brought up as a potential blocker to doing
83 something about the Off The Wall forum during Council discussions in
84 December 2020)
85 - Distfiles hosting (bug #176186, opened April 2007)
86 - Allow retirement team to process retirements without infra
87 involvement (bug #311511)
88 - Various packages.gentoo.org bugs
89 - Setting up the new $25k servers Council approved
90 - Integration with RelEng processes is a pain
91 - Gitlab + CI
92 - Something needed for the new glsamaker?
93 - Probably more I've forgotten
94
95 It's just generally difficult to get infra to do almost anything in a
96 timely fashion. I don't know what Council can do to resolve this
97 situation other than to highlight it as a problem.