Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Making the developer community more open

[Daniel Goller <morfic@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 09:15 -0500, Dan Meltzer wrote:
> Asking developers to "proxy" takes almost as much time as it does to
> ask them to maintain a package by themselves. 

wrong

>  The developer is
> directly responsible for anything he commits, so he will have to still
> test the ebuild, still test any revisions, and still follow the
> package to make sure there are no problems.  The writing the ebuild
> part of the process is not that much of the commitment, I don't see
> the point.
> 

we are not just talking about new ebuilds/bumps
having someone do all the work and having to only verify the end results
of the users work is a big help, instead of having to look into the
problem, checking if a fix exists elsewhere, or digging through the
source yourself, you verify the fix solves the problem and does only
that.

and everyone wins

> On 3/22/06, Thomas Cort <linuxgeek@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > A developer could then take these ebuilds, make sure they
> > > > don't do anything malicious, or break QA, or whatever, and act as the
> > > > bridge between the portage tree and the users actually working on the
> > > > ebuild and keeping things up to date and working.
> >
> > > The easiest way to handle "contrib" as far as that "big warning" is to
> > > make it a separate tree.  That way, folks who want the flexibility get
> > > it, but those who prefer not to "risk it", don't  have to worry about it.
> > > As well, contribs becomes another fertile developer recruitment ground.
> >
> > Why would the packages need a "big warning"/overlay/eclass if they
> > were checked by a developer to make sure they "don't do anything
> > malicious, or break QA, or whatever"? There are many user contributed
> > ebuilds that have made their way into portage after being reviewed by
> > devs that don't have any such warnings.
> >
> > I don't think creating a "contrib" overlay as an official part of
> > Gentoo would be a good idea because making it an official Gentoo
> > project conveys a certain level of quality. If the quality is there,
> > then why not add the ebuilds to portage in the first place? If the
> > quality isn't there, then you will have a lot of unhappy users
> > complaining that an official Gentoo overlay broke their system.
> >
> > Having a non-Gentoo sponsored contrib overlay wouldn't be a good idea
> > either IMO because the contributors wouldn't be contributing to
> > Gentoo, and they wouldn't be interacting as much with the Gentoo
> > developer community. Sure they would learn a lot of the skills
> > required to be a Gentoo developer, but they wouldn't be increasing the
> > value of anything in portage (unless they got a proxy to commit some
> > of their work to portage). Also, there are many overlays out there
> > already. Adding another one won't help with "making the developer
> > community more open". Additionally, I don't personally know of a lot
> > of people who actually use third party overlays except to get an
> > ebuild for a particular package they want or to beta test ebuilds.
> >
> > -Thomas
> >
> > --
> > gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
> >
> >
> 

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