Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] Making "stabilization" a prerequisite to become a Gentoo Developer

[Andrew Savchenko]

Hi,

On Sun, 01 Oct 2017 18:13:32 -0500 Christopher Díaz wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I would like to propose to the community a new policy in the process of
> "becoming a developer". Here is the initial draft, do not hesitate to
> point out anything that needs to be discussed.

This will result in having less developers and at the end of the
day less arch testing and stabilization.

Our recruitment bar is already quite high. While ensuring basic
mandatory skills is OK and understandable, we should not offload
dirty work on newbies. The same way we may demand work in many
other understaffed areas and will have less and less new developers.

Besides, it is not mandatory for developers to use stable
themselves and some of us are using stable only on occasion or not
at all, because of $reasons. For some people stable is a perfect
fit, for others it is not practical.

> Prepare the next generation of developers to be able to test and
> stabilize their own packages, and help other devs in stabilization,
> would benefit the whole community and give all mentors, recruiters and
> users wanting to become a official gentoo developer a starting point
> with endless work to do, and at the same time mentors and recruiters
> would have a place to look for prospectives developers.

Problem is not in current developers being unable to stabilize
their packages due to insufficient skills. Problem is in:

a) lack of hardware with ready setup access, especially for rare
arches;

b) our rules forbidding developers to stabilize packages
themselves if they are not on the arch team; the only exception is
amd64 with an unwritten policy allowing developers to stabilize
stuff themselves.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko