Re: [gentoo-project] Recruitment issues and potential improvement

[hasufell]

Andreas K. Huettel:
>
> Doing a thorough review of submitted code can be harder than writing it
> yourself.

Only if the PR is low quality and I don't know the contributor yet. It
could be simplified with automatic travis build logs etc.
That has already been done in other distros and is nothing spectacular.

> If I merge, I'm responsible for it. Which is why I am not entirely
> happy with a pull request based workflow... To put it blunt and exaggerate,
> why should I put in a lot of work and take over responsibility for a bunch of
> lazies who want to contribute somehow but feel disinclined to do it properly?
>

Because you want to teach them?

> The recruiting is the process where people prove they can themselves take
> responsibility for our users and are willing to do it.
>

You prove once and then are free to mess up regularly? Hmm.

>> I've been asked recently by a community member if he should bother to
>> try to become a gentoo dev, because he heard it's a pain.
>> Then again... regularly contributing to gentoo via bug reports is even
>> more a pain... so he's just running yet another personal overlay.
>
> Yes. Exactly. 100% true. We all know this situation.
>
> So, as you point out, a decentral operation is one solution (reduced core
> repository, more overlays). What it means though is that all quality control
> measures in place (security team, arch team, qa team, rules what needs
> discussion on the lists, ...) only apply to the main tree, and the overlays
> slip out of it. Which is something that I plainly do not want. Even if things
> do not work perfectly now, we'd still lose far too much.
>

Please don't mix my idea of decentralization with an enforced review
workflow. Both concepts are totally orthogonal. You can have a
centralized concept and very good review and a decentralized concept
with very poor review and any other combination.

I'd still vote for combining this with a decentralized concept, because
it may solve even more problems, but that point is irrelevant for this
topic.

> Here's my answer to your contributor: "It's great that you're considering it,
> and we're happy to help you. It's worth becoming a full dev, since you have
> far more possibilities to directly contribute and also influence where Gentoo
> is going. However, it's going to be some work and it will need some
> commitment."
>

I already told him to focus on contributing to project overlays if he
cares about ebuild writing only... so that he gets reviews and doesn't
just stick to his own overlay.

>> The fact that projects like proxy-maintainers and sunrise have to exist
>> are proof that we are doing something wrong! I'm not discrediting any of
>> those. They fill a gap, but the question is... why do we have that gap
>> in the first place?
>
> Because you can't answer the quizzes in 166 characters and submit them via
> Instagram?
>

I was referring to missing tools, workflow and review culture. Git might
improve it... but it's not enough. See sunrise... the migration to git
didn't add anything of value.


Because contributing is cumbersome we need projects like
proxy-maintainers. But from my experience that doesn't work very well.
Project overlays on github currently work better. Less indirection.

And I've sometimes seen people in the git log who have been contributing
for ~3+ years with high-quality ebuilds without ever being asked to join
the team.
Then I asked them via mail and now guess the answer... (and... is it
even bad?)