[gentoo-project] Council manifesto 2016/2017

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

Hi all,

Sorry I have not managed to formulate a manifesto sooner. If you
haven't voted yet, please consider whether you think my positions as
formulated below make sense.

I've been a Gentoo user since about 2004 and developer since for 7
years now (I think?). My home team is the Python project, where I was
the elected lead for a couple of years before handing that role over
to the very capable Mike G. In my day job, I'm the manager of a C++
development team (jobs available in C++ and Java, BTW!); in my spare
time I do a lot of open source work (100 commits in 15 projects in the
last month), mainly in Python and more recently in Rust.

For me, Gentoo is about being modular, flexible, and therefore in many
ways supporting of doing cutting-edge stuff with. In order to improve
further, I see two important goals: improve the community, and make
sure we don't get stuck with legacy stuff/scaling problems.

Improving the community:

Personally I feel that many of our discussions devolve into long
threads with long emails reiterating the same positions over and over.
If you, too, feel that this is an issue, I would like to take a bit
more active role in moderating discussions in our community (I'm
mainly thinking on gentoo-dev), or empowering others to work on trying
to better moderate mailing list threads, for example by making sure
summaries are posted along the way to keep things accessible. With a
pretty big team, we need to make sure that we keep moving forward,
instead of getting bogged down in the status quo.

At the same time, some individuals take so much responsible that they
can come across quite hostile, even when they act with the best
interest of the distribution at heart. In the past, I have reached out
to some on an individual basis to make sure they're okay, to discuss
how responsibilities can be shared better, and how such outbursts can
be avoided. I think it can be useful to zoom out a bit and figure out
how things can be managed/improved without placing an undue burden on
some individuals that will feel a lot of stress from the
responsibility.

Finally, recruitment is ever important. Improving our contribution
"funnel" (going from being an interested outside observer, to being a
user, to filing a bug, to creating a pull request, to becoming a
developer) is very important to me to guarantee the long-term health
of the distribution.

Improving the code/technical stuff:

As Gentoo ages and grows, I worry that we're taking longer and longer
to move stuff forward. For example, think of stabilizing new Python
versions, stabilizing Apache 2.4 (where I took a somewhat active role)
or bringing new gcc versions to all of our users. Having a single
obscure blocker can sometimes delay the process for everyone else for
months, which I think will grow worse over time and become
unacceptable. We will need to think about better ways to move forward.

Note that I'm largely a user of the stable distribution (on amd64),
with targeted unstable packages where I know I can trust and/or track
upstream. We will have to figure out ways to leave un(der)maintained
packages behind sooner if we are to keep up the pace -- and I think
with today's software not keeping up to date is not an option.
Security is another part of this puzzle that I think is extremely
important.

I'm not a bash or PMS wizard -- others are much better for that.
Instead, expect me to focus on bigger picture things, but with deep
software engineering experience. If this sounds useful/interesting,
please consider voting for me. If you have any questions or feedback,
please let me know!

Thanks,

Dirkjan