[gentoo-project] RFC: "Trusted contributor model"

[Joonas Niilola]

Cross-posting to gentoo-dev and -project lists due to technical and
non-technical nature. Reply-to is set to -project.

Once again new council has been elected: congratulations to the chosen
members! And once again many nominees expressed their wishes to see more
non-developer contributors to become official developers. Yet, only very
few people (if any) are interested in mentoring them. I get it, the
relationship between a mentor and their mentee is very intimate, and
mentoring takes a lot of time. While the Github PRs are helping us
increase the user contributions merged, perhaps it's distancing us from
creating stronger bonds with the contributors? But more about this topic
later.


1st RFC: "Trusted contributor model"

I'm proposing us to giving special commit access to our well-reputable
contributors (mostly proxied maintainers). They'd have access _only_ to
their maintained package in git-tree. To understand what I mean, check
  git shortlog -s -n net-im/telegram-desktop-bin/
  git shortlog -s -n net-im/signal-desktop-bin/

There are few packages like these where I'd already trust the core
proxied maintainer to commit at their will. It's as ajak said during the
council election; _We_ are the bottleneck currently reviewing and
_testing_ contributions, and with these two examples above, 99 % of time
everything's in condition and we just need to merge. Obviously if these
trusted contributors had to touch another package, or anything in
profiles/ (just basically anything outside their dedicated package
directory) they'd have to do a PR or .patch file to be merged by
official developers. And they'd still need a proxy Gentoo
developer/project listed in metadata, at least for now, to take
responsibility.

On the technical side I'm not sure how to achieve this, but I know it
can be done. For example the sync-repos are compiled like this all the
time. If this proposal gains support, I'm willing to start figuring it
out more in-depth.

AFAIK Fedora and Arch have somewhat similar systems in place already.


2nd RFC: Recruiting proven contributors without a mentor

I'm aware recruiters don't really need to ask a permission here, but I
believe it's great to gauge the general feelings about this beforehand.
What would you say if recruiters started more actively approaching
potential developers? And currently I'm talking about people who have
been active for a very long time (+year or two), who keep up with
development-wise changes in Gentoo (eclasses, EAPI, virtuals...),
participate in the community, and always provide top-quality
contributions, but for some reason never got a mentor? I'd like to point
out that this method would only be for the very few ones and recruiting
through mentoring would still be the desired method. Recruiting through
recruiters would still require the candidate to fill the
ebuild/developer quiz, and they'd have to pass it without a mentor. So
I'll emphasize: Currently only few special ones would qualify.

But seeing the general lack of interest towards mentoring, maybe this is
something we _need_ to do in near future.

-- juippis