RE: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part II.

["Stuart Herbert" <stuart@myrddraal.demon.co.uk>]

> I hope you realise that your desires are conflicting. more 
> ebuilds leads to 
> more unmaintained ebuilds. More QA needs more time.

Rubbish.  Totally utter rubbish.

The right levels of QA *save* time, because things are done
as-right-as-they-can-be first time.  Instead of time going into bug fixing
and constantly re-doing what has been done, the time instead goes into
moving forward, and doing new things.  *Too much* QA just bogs the whole
thing down, and makes it impossible to get anything done in a timely
fashion.  The two are very different.

I can think of one way to make dealing with unmaintained ebuilds easy
enough.  First of all, put in place a mechanism to remove the guesswork
about whether a particular package is maintained or not.  Then, create a
pool of developers who will handle new ebuilds for these packages.  Finally,
make a site where people can come and tell you when an ebuild is out of date
(or just use Bugzilla).  That way, packages that no-one particularly wants
to maintain are driven by 'customer demand' (for lack of a better phrase).
Final step is to setup some 'tinderbox' machines, where the unmaintained
ebuilds are automatically built.  When they finally break, a bug could be
automatically raised on Bugzilla for someone in the pool to look at it.

There's also another way.  Encourage more opensource projects to maintain
their own ebuilds.  Many of them maintain SPEC files for building RedHat
RPMs.  So why not try and distribute the work more widely too?

What are *your* proposals for addressing this?  I'd like to hear them.

> We are trying to address these problems in a way that is 
> satisfactory for everyone.

Are you speaking for yourself, or for TheManagement(tm)?

> Be assured that these issues are being addressed. This 
> requires time though, as restructuring is necessary for it to happen.

You talk like we should run along and play, and not bother BigPeople(tm)
like yourself.  You'll have to excuse me if I don't like that ;-)  It's
exactly this sort of *presentation* (I use the work presentation because
you've included nothing of substance in your reply!) that makes people call
for more openness in the community.  Interesting.

Best regards,
Stu
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