Re: [gentoo-server] Portage Maintenance

[Mark Rudholm]

On Tuesday 07 September 2004 09:40, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 09:29:18AM -0700 or thereabouts, Mark Rudholm wrote:
> > What I wanted to do was understand what the problem is.  I can't decide
> > how to respond unless I understand something about the problem first.
> > And if the problem is a shortage of developers, as seems to be the
> > consensus, then I have my answer.  I'd be interested in hearing
> > discussion on how that can be addressed (as a trend, not on an individual
> > basis), but if we can't get past the "well, you should contribute!"
> > stage, then obviously that discussion can't be had here.
>
> Speaking about ebuild upgrades, specifically, that is a problem that may
> have a different solution.  Previously, I have suggested (in other
> channels) having a fourth tier of ebuilds in the tree (right now, we have
> hard masked, arch masked and stable).  The fourth tier would be "totally
> untested and unsupported" and would/could consist of user-contributed
> ebuilds.  There would/could be a feedback process for these ebuilds and,
> after a certain threshold had been reached, a fourth-tier ebuild could be
> automatically moved into ~arch status.

That sounds like a good idea, particularly in light of the fact that the 
bottleneck seems to be getting ebuilds committed to Portage.  (there's one 
for OpenVPN waiting to go)

I was also thinking that there should be another class of contributor, in 
addition to "Developer".  Something like "Packager".  "Developers" should be 
writing code, and Gentoo code would seem to me to consist primarily of 
Portage and the Gentoo installer(s).  Most of the day-to-day maintenance work 
would seem to be "packaging" not "developing".  In addition to accuracy, 
using the term "packager" might help in that it's less daunting for 
newcomers.

-Mark