[gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
and maybe give the webpage a makeover? Marketing is a big part of the
problem.

  1. Even MediaWiki (wiki.gentoo.org) looks better than www.gentoo.org.
     That's impressive-bad.

     People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
     the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable. No one
     would suspect that anything has changed, though, since the
     homepage hasn't since before I could drink beer.

     It makes the entire distro look unmaintained.

  2. Nowhere is it actually spelled out how to become a developer.
     Let's google "how to become a gentoo developer." This takes me
     to...

> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2

     which as far as I know, is complete bullshit. I should look for an
     opening in the monthly newsletter? Really? Or in #gentoo-bugs?

  3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
     don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.

All three of those problems are boring and will suck to fix -- perfect
candidates for bug bounties.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Fabian Groffen]

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On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.

It doesn't, and it's not.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

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On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
>> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's
>> important.
> 
> It doesn't, and it's not.
> 

I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
think about it this way.

Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will
learn git, because a large number of important projects use git. No
(new) developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.

Therefore, we can rule out "using CVS is helping us attract new
developers."
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Fabian Groffen]

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On 16-12-2012 12:20:10 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will
> learn git, because a large number of important projects use git. No
> (new) developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.
> 
> Therefore, we can rule out "using CVS is helping us attract new
> developers."

But it's sufficiently easy to learn (significantly easier than git) that
any person who is not capable of doing so would unlikely be a good
candiate to become a Gentoo developer.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

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On 12/16/2012 12:23 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> On 16-12-2012 12:20:10 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>> Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project
>> will learn git, because a large number of important projects use
>> git. No (new) developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.
>> 
>> Therefore, we can rule out "using CVS is helping us attract new 
>> developers."
> 
> But it's sufficiently easy to learn (significantly easier than git)
> that any person who is not capable of doing so would unlikely be a
> good candiate to become a Gentoo developer.
> 

Actually, I agree with this. But lots of people who are capable of
learning CVS just don't want to, since it's (soon to be) a useless
skill and perceived as a waste of time. Requiring everyone to do so is
a disincentive -- that's all that I was suggesting. By eliminating the
disincentive, you potentially attract more developers.

You don't want to attract incompetent people obviously, but the
overall cost/benefit of becoming a Gentoo developer needs to be less
than that of saying "screw it" and working on Arch instead. When it
isn't, you lose people.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Fabian Groffen]

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On 16-12-2012 12:40:23 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> Actually, I agree with this. But lots of people who are capable of
> learning CVS just don't want to, since it's (soon to be) a useless
> skill and perceived as a waste of time. Requiring everyone to do so is
> a disincentive -- that's all that I was suggesting. By eliminating the
> disincentive, you potentially attract more developers.

You know just as good as me that this is being worked on.  I see no need
to reiterate on the topic.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Duncan]

Michael Orlitzky posted on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:20:10 -0500 as excerpted:

> On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>> On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>>> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
>>> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
>> 
>> It doesn't, and it's not.
>> 
> I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
> think about it this way.
> 
> Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will learn
> git, because a large number of important projects use git. No (new)
> developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.
> 
> Therefore, we can rule out "using CVS is helping us attract new
> developers."

I agree getting off of CVS is important in that it's likely triggering a 
writeoff of gentoo from the list of potential volunteers before they even 
get to where we see them, but AFAIK, the switch to git /is/ making (slow) 
progress.  One of the big blockers was apparently taken care of via 
bounty (relatively) recently, and I don't think they'd have spent the 
money on that if they believed it to be pouring that money down a rathole.

Before finding out about that, I too had despaired of the git transition 
being anything but "bluesky", but that's concrete indication that 
/somebody/ is still working on it, and that it's considered important 
enough for the gentoo foundation to spend money on.


Meanwhile, I'm not sure how practical your bounty for recruiting spruceup 
is, since much of that work's likely to require intimate knowledge of 
gentoo and recruiting to approve, if not to actually do, and that level 
of knowledge is apparently in short supply, or recruiting wouldn't be the 
bottleneck it seems to be.

I don't know how important a general gentoo web page redesign might be (I 
think what's there is perfectly functional and great), but you're 
certainly correct on the content itself; anything still mentioning 
looking for openings in the weekly newsletter is... anachronistic I think 
is the term.  Have you checked for and filed if necessary, a bug on that?

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/16/2012 01:27 PM, Duncan wrote:
> Michael Orlitzky posted on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:20:10 -0500 as excerpted:
> 
>> On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>>> On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>>>> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
>>>> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
>>>
>>> It doesn't, and it's not.
>>>
>> I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
>> think about it this way.
>>
>> Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will learn
>> git, because a large number of important projects use git. No (new)
>> developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.
>>
>> Therefore, we can rule out "using CVS is helping us attract new
>> developers."
> 
> I agree getting off of CVS is important in that it's likely triggering a 
> writeoff of gentoo from the list of potential volunteers before they even 
> get to where we see them, but AFAIK, the switch to git /is/ making (slow) 
> progress.  One of the big blockers was apparently taken care of via 
> bounty (relatively) recently, and I don't think they'd have spent the 
> money on that if they believed it to be pouring that money down a rathole.
> 
> Before finding out about that, I too had despaired of the git transition 
> being anything but "bluesky", but that's concrete indication that 
> /somebody/ is still working on it, and that it's considered important 
> enough for the gentoo foundation to spend money on.
> 

Thanks. I know progress has been made and I didn't mean to belittle that
effort. But I know I'm not alone in thinking CVS deters new people.


> 
> Meanwhile, I'm not sure how practical your bounty for recruiting spruceup 
> is, since much of that work's likely to require intimate knowledge of 
> gentoo and recruiting to approve, if not to actually do, and that level 
> of knowledge is apparently in short supply, or recruiting wouldn't be the 
> bottleneck it seems to be.
> 

True. I've observed that the sunrise and proxy-maint projects already do
a lot of this work. The quality of ebuilds that get past review in
either situation is on average higher than that of those which don't.

I hate to criticize without offering a suggestion, so here's a wild one:
pay someone from the recruiters, sunrise, and/or proxy-maint teams to
recruit and train new developers. Pay them a reasonable wage, say,
$15-20/hr. out of the foundation to actively recruit new people.

We fix the recruitment docs, and make the homepage attractive. Then we
put out press releases on Slashdot, Reddit, etc. and announce to
gentoo-users@g.o that we're looking to train new developers. Send them
to the new docs, which will in turn tell them to,

  * Be familiar with gentoo system administration

  * Know the devmanual forwards and backwards

  * Practice committing ebuilds to an overlay

  * Submit ebuilds for review in #gentoo-sunrise and #gentoo-dev-help

  * Learn CVS (ugh)

  ...

  * Contact the guy we're paying to mentor people, who will then train,
    test, and recruit him.

You'll get tons of new developers. In the long-term, that's a highly
effective use of the money.

Most of the day-to-day work that needs done is not life-threatening. If
we can get people wrangling bugs, bumping packages, and communicating
with upstream, it will make a big difference.


> I don't know how important a general gentoo web page redesign might be (I 
> think what's there is perfectly functional and great), but you're 
> certainly correct on the content itself; anything still mentioning 
> looking for openings in the weekly newsletter is... anachronistic I think 
> is the term.  Have you checked for and filed if necessary, a bug on that?
> 

I have some specific suggestions for the homepage, but in general I
think it just needs to look like it wasn't made in 2001. We need to look
attractive to attract things. I hope that's not controversial too!

And yeah, yeah, I'll go file bugs =)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Kacper Kowalik]

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On 16.12.2012 18:20, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>> On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>>> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
>>> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's
>>> important.
> 
>> It doesn't, and it's not.
> 
> 
> I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
> think about it this way.
> 
> Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will
> learn git, because a large number of important projects use git. No
> (new) developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.

But there's nothing to learn... You only need to c'n'p code listings 1.1
- 1.3 [1] once in a lifetime of your dev box. Then you only type 'cvs
up' for the rest of your developer life. If you ever encounter anything
unusual and you don't want to waste precious time to even read the
warning/error message you rm -rf offending directory and you do... 'cvs
up'. How hard is that?
Cheers,
Kacper

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=4





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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michał Górny]

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On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:43:52 +0100
Kacper Kowalik <xarthisius@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 16.12.2012 18:20, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> > On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> >> On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> >>> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
> >>> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's
> >>> important.
> > 
> >> It doesn't, and it's not.
> > 
> > 
> > I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
> > think about it this way.
> > 
> > Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will
> > learn git, because a large number of important projects use git. No
> > (new) developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.
> 
> But there's nothing to learn... You only need to c'n'p code listings 1.1
> - 1.3 [1] once in a lifetime of your dev box. Then you only type 'cvs
> up' for the rest of your developer life. If you ever encounter anything
> unusual and you don't want to waste precious time to even read the
> warning/error message you rm -rf offending directory and you do... 'cvs
> up'. How hard is that?

Did you mean 'cvs up -dP'? i think you've just proven that it is
actually not friendly at all.

You also have to move files to random locations to be able to keep
a few changes at a time, maintain ChangeLogs, make sure not to
mistakenly commit 'repo_name' when you're workgin with a partial
checkout and, of course, remove it from profiles/ ChangeLogs all
the time. Yes, CVS is one of the biggest PITA in Gentoo.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michał Górny]

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On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:20:10 -0500
Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:

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> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> > On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> >> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
> >> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's
> >> important.
> > 
> > It doesn't, and it's not.
> > 
> 
> I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
> think about it this way.

Get off powerpoint for your god of choice's sake. Nobody wants to work
with that (well, everybody I meet outside actually wants but
whatever) :P. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

- -- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/16/12 16:32, Michał Górny wrote:
> 
> Get off powerpoint for your god of choice's sake. Nobody wants to work
> with that (well, everybody I meet outside actually wants but
> whatever) :P. Sorry, couldn't resist.
> 

I was hoping nobody would call my bluff. This is the only avenue
available to me for creating a powerpoint presentation:

  $ echo "I KNOW I'M RIGHT" >> git-cvs-statistics-2012.pptx

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Richard Yao]

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On 12/16/2012 12:20 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 12/16/2012 12:02 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>> On 16-12-2012 11:57:35 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>>> 3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that.
>>> I don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's
>>> important.
> 
>> It doesn't, and it's not.
> 
> 
> I'm not going to put together a powerpoint presentation for you, but
> think about it this way.
> 
> Many new developers who want to contribute to to some project will
> learn git, because a large number of important projects use git. No
> (new) developers are going to learn CVS. Ever.
> 
> Therefore, we can rule out "using CVS is helping us attract new
> developers."
> 

I have to agree with grobian. Gentoo development involves minimal CVS
knowledge. People pull from CVS and use repoman to commit. Repoman is
necessary for committing changes to CVS in a way that guarentees that
the tree is consistent and does quite a few QA checks to ensure that
mistakes are not made. In my experience it works equally well with both
CVS and GIT.

With that said, we have a GIT migration planned, but it has taken years
because people want to preserve the CVS history.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Samuli Suominen]

On 16/12/12 18:57, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
>    3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>       don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.

Meh. I actually like CVS and it's very suitable for gentoo-x86 tree.

However, if enough people want a change, I'll change with it...

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Damien Levac]

I completely agree, myself, I want to become a developer, but since the
information looks so scattered, I decided to wait until summer to have
all the required time to find/read all relevant documentation and
foillow up with the recruitment process (which seems to be somehow
'non-trivial').

As an aside, which may or may not reflect the view of other potential
candidates, even though I use git for my personal projects, having to
learn CVS would not be an issue if I'm already willing to learn
everything else. (However, if there is no guarantee that this will be
useful, why is it a requirement in the first place?)

Damien

On 12/16/12 11:57, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
> and maybe give the webpage a makeover? Marketing is a big part of the
> problem.
>
>   1. Even MediaWiki (wiki.gentoo.org) looks better than www.gentoo.org.
>      That's impressive-bad.
>
>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable. No one
>      would suspect that anything has changed, though, since the
>      homepage hasn't since before I could drink beer.
>
>      It makes the entire distro look unmaintained.
>
>   2. Nowhere is it actually spelled out how to become a developer.
>      Let's google "how to become a gentoo developer." This takes me
>      to...
>
>> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2
>      which as far as I know, is complete bullshit. I should look for an
>      opening in the monthly newsletter? Really? Or in #gentoo-bugs?
>
>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
>
> All three of those problems are boring and will suck to fix -- perfect
> candidates for bug bounties.
>
>

[gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Duncan]

Damien Levac posted on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:49:03 -0500 as excerpted:

> As an aside, which may or may not reflect the view of other potential
> candidates, even though I use git for my personal projects, having to
> learn CVS would not be an issue if I'm already willing to learn
> everything else. (However, if there is no guarantee that this will be
> useful, why is it a requirement in the first place?)

IMO, learning CVS shouldn't be a problem once people know they want to be 
involved in gentoo, once gentoo is on their short-list, so to speak. 
which generally means that people are gentoo users, thus being 
comfortable with gentoo and having it on their short list, before they 
become gentoo devs.  What concerns me is that a lot of folks may simply 
never be getting to that point.

Back when I was originally researching gentoo, it was not only for use as 
a user, which I became, but also with the idea that I wasn't interested 
in a distro that I wouldn't at some point be interested in contributing 
to, ultimately as a dev, should it come to that.  Back then, we were much 
closer to the whole zynot thing, and I did my due diligence there as part 
of my gentoo research.  I came to the conclusion that the poor guy must 
looking in a mirror and mistaking his own defects for those of others, 
DRobbins and gentoo in this case.  Kind of ironic how often that seems to 
happen, but it sure seemed to be happening there.  That's all water under 
the bridge now, but the point remains, I did that research because I 
wanted to be sure I was comfortable with gentoo enough to be proud to be 
identified with it, to the point of being a dev if it should come to it.

If I were doing the same thing today, I'd be doing my research, and well 
before I became a gentoo user I'd see this CVS thing.  Knowing what I 
know (or arguably simply perceive, possibly incorrectly) about how 
outmoded that technology is, I'd have gentoo crossed off my /long/ list 
even before I knew enough about it to properly consider it.  I strongly 
suspect I'd end up on arch.

Arch, it would seem, is where a lot of Linux users looking for a user 
customizable distribution that would have formerly ended up on gentoo, 
end up.  It certainly has the buzz that gentoo had back in the day, and 
that's been the case for some years now.

So my concern is that the people we're potentially losing due to CVS are 
being lost so early in their evaluation process that they're not even 
gentoo users yet, and for all practical purposes, we don't even know they 
exist or were a potential gentoo dev in the first place.


Meanwhile, my personal devhood blocker is the same as it was five years 
ago.  Apparently, IRC is a hard requirement.  At least the one final 
evaluation must be done on IRC.  But in that regard I guess I'm an old 
fogey.  I strongly prefer and function better with the async nature of 
email and mailing lists, and have enough negative experience with 
synchronous "instant messaging" type apps to know better than to subject 
myself to what is in effect the stress of a job interview, in an 
environment I already know I'm not at my best in.  It may be stupid 
objection, but it's a hoop I'm not jumping thru, at least not if there's 
not some potential for it to pay my bills on the other side.  And if it's 
so stupid and insignificant, that goes both ways, it's stupid to force 
such a stupid hoop-jump from what are after all volunteer recruits, when 
there's such a claimed developer shortage.  Either there is such a 
shortage and such trivial hoop-jumps should be cleared from the process 
as unjustified extra costs, or there is no such shortage, rather more an 
overage of candidates, and gentoo can afford to place such hoop-jumps in 
the process in ordered to help trim the list of candidates to some 
reasonable level.

So while I initially thought I might eventually become a gentoo dev (and 
did have several offers of mentorship), and used to feel a bit guilty 
about not getting around to studying for the quizes, etc, once I found 
out about the IRC hoop-jump, I decided I had better things to do with my 
time, and didn't worry about the quizzes, etc, any more, as that was now 
someone else's problem, not mine.

In a way it's sad, as I've outlasted a generation or two of devs by now, 
and expect I'll outlast a few more.  What might I have contributed in 
that time?  But as volunteers will, I've found other projects to 
volunteer my time and talent to, gentoo users have their own contribution 
to make too, and given how important IRC evidently is to being a well 
functioning gentoo dev (well, that, or there's enough of an overage of 
recruits that as I said they need a way to weed out a few), I couldn't 
have been happy doing it anyway, so it's good I found out before 
seriously getting into the quizzes, etc, wasting both my time and that of 
the recruiters.

So these days I don't worry about it, except to the extent it affects me 
as a gentoo user.  The dev stuff is clearly not a problem I need to worry 
about.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Peter Stuge]

Duncan wrote:
> Apparently, IRC is a hard requirement.  At least the one final 
> evaluation must be done on IRC.

I understand why online communication is not everyone's prefered format.

I guess that the IRC part of the recruitment is not very formal, I
don't know as I haven't seen one, but in general I would expect that
it is simply a lightweight substitute for going to the pub and having
a chat in person, or talking on the phone to a friend.

I further guess that if you would prefer a chat with someone over the
phone then that could work just as well.

That said, I find that IRC is a useful tool for developers sometimes.
It's not mandatory by any means, and sometimes it's just a huge time
sink, and a little bit like filing bugs it isn't mandatory, but it
*can* be useful.


//Peter

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 17 December 2012 22:13, Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:
> Duncan wrote:
>> Apparently, IRC is a hard requirement.  At least the one final
>> evaluation must be done on IRC.
>
> I understand why online communication is not everyone's prefered format.
>
> I guess that the IRC part of the recruitment is not very formal, I
> don't know as I haven't seen one, but in general I would expect that
> it is simply a lightweight substitute for going to the pub and having
> a chat in person, or talking on the phone to a friend.
>
> I further guess that if you would prefer a chat with someone over the
> phone then that could work just as well.
>
> That said, I find that IRC is a useful tool for developers sometimes.
> It's not mandatory by any means, and sometimes it's just a huge time
> sink, and a little bit like filing bugs it isn't mandatory, but it
> *can* be useful.
>
>
> //Peter
>

Nowadays, I use google docs ( and I am also open to g+ and skype
interviews as well ). So IRC is not an absolute requirement.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

[gentoo-dev] Re: Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Duncan]

Markos Chandras posted on Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:44:23 +0000 as excerpted:

> Nowadays, I use google docs ( and I am also open to g+ and skype
> interviews as well ). So IRC is not an absolute requirement.

Thanks.  Good to know.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Pacho Ramos]

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El dom, 16-12-2012 a las 12:49 -0500, Damien Levac escribió:
> I completely agree, myself, I want to become a developer, but since the
> information looks so scattered, I decided to wait until summer to have
> all the required time to find/read all relevant documentation and
> foillow up with the recruitment process (which seems to be somehow
> 'non-trivial').
> 
> As an aside, which may or may not reflect the view of other potential
> candidates, even though I use git for my personal projects, having to
> learn CVS would not be an issue if I'm already willing to learn
> everything else. (However, if there is no guarantee that this will be
> useful, why is it a requirement in the first place?)
> 
> Damien

For now, I think you should "simply" go to devmanual:
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/

You will need to read it sooner and later... and I am sure that you will
read it faster as you think once you start to read ;)

Best regards! :)

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Damien Levac]

This is funny, because after replying to the list, I actually wrote
myself a script to extract that manual from the website into pdf. I
should start reading soon... after my other book... xD

Damien

On 12/16/12 17:34, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El dom, 16-12-2012 a las 12:49 -0500, Damien Levac escribió:
>> I completely agree, myself, I want to become a developer, but since the
>> information looks so scattered, I decided to wait until summer to have
>> all the required time to find/read all relevant documentation and
>> foillow up with the recruitment process (which seems to be somehow
>> 'non-trivial').
>>
>> As an aside, which may or may not reflect the view of other potential
>> candidates, even though I use git for my personal projects, having to
>> learn CVS would not be an issue if I'm already willing to learn
>> everything else. (However, if there is no guarantee that this will be
>> useful, why is it a requirement in the first place?)
>>
>> Damien
> For now, I think you should "simply" go to devmanual:
> http://devmanual.gentoo.org/
>
> You will need to read it sooner and later... and I am sure that you will
> read it faster as you think once you start to read ;)
>
> Best regards! :)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Andreas K. Huettel]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: Text/Plain, Size: 2706 bytes --]

>   1. Even MediaWiki (wiki.gentoo.org) looks better than www.gentoo.org.
>      That's impressive-bad.
> 
>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable. No one
>      would suspect that anything has changed, though, since the
>      homepage hasn't since before I could drink beer.
> 
>      It makes the entire distro look unmaintained.

Yeah. Stable. Hehe...

The problem with the entire webpage is that is coded in an extremely obscure 
way. It is probably easier to 100% replace it from scratch than to modify and 
improve it. Yes, I've tried to analyze once how e.g. the table of blog posts 
or the GLSA announcements on the main page come together.

My personal suggestion would be to code an internal replacement and 
transparently port more and more pages to it (as a change mostly invisible 
from outside, with two content management systems running concurrently for a 
transition period). Once the transition is complete, improvements can be made 
in a more sweeping way. 

How to do this, however, and what software to target should probably be 
decided by people who know more than me... and in the end it all boils down to 
"who has the time and motivation".


>   2. Nowhere is it actually spelled out how to become a developer.
>      Let's google "how to become a gentoo developer." This takes me
>      to...
> 
> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2
> 
>      which as far as I know, is complete bullshit. I should look for an
>      opening in the monthly newsletter? Really? Or in #gentoo-bugs?

That page BADLY needs an update. It should however probably also reflect 
reality in the sense that you cannot really "apply to become a developer". 
What you can do is help out, be useful, get noticed, and be offered the job.
(That at least is my personal impression on how it works.)


>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
> 

There's exactly one argument in favour of CVS, and Fabian has already made it. 
Indeed CVS *is* stone age software. However, until you've actually become a 
Gentoo dev, you will not need to touch it, and then learning the minimal CVS 
requirements should then be the very least of your worries. So this point is 
probably a bit out of context here. 

(/me remembers that the monthly reminder mail "how is the migration going" 
still needs to be sent...)

Cheers, A

-- 

Andreas K. Huettel
Gentoo Linux developer 
dilfridge@gentoo.org
http://www.akhuettel.de/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/16/12 13:53, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
>>   1. Even MediaWiki (wiki.gentoo.org) looks better than www.gentoo.org.
>>      That's impressive-bad.
>>
>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable. No one
>>      would suspect that anything has changed, though, since the
>>      homepage hasn't since before I could drink beer.
>>
>>      It makes the entire distro look unmaintained.
> 
> Yeah. Stable. Hehe...
> 
> The problem with the entire webpage is that is coded in an extremely obscure 
> way. It is probably easier to 100% replace it from scratch than to modify and 
> improve it. Yes, I've tried to analyze once how e.g. the table of blog posts 
> or the GLSA announcements on the main page come together.
> 
> My personal suggestion would be to code an internal replacement and 
> transparently port more and more pages to it (as a change mostly invisible 
> from outside, with two content management systems running concurrently for a 
> transition period). Once the transition is complete, improvements can be made 
> in a more sweeping way. 
> 
> How to do this, however, and what software to target should probably be 
> decided by people who know more than me... and in the end it all boils down to 
> "who has the time and motivation".
> 

This sounds reasonable, but it's a huge project either way. No one is
ever going to have the time or motivation, thus the suggestion to do a
bug bounty for it.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 16 December 2012 18:53, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>   1. Even MediaWiki (wiki.gentoo.org) looks better than www.gentoo.org.
>>      That's impressive-bad.
>>
>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable. No one
>>      would suspect that anything has changed, though, since the
>>      homepage hasn't since before I could drink beer.
>>
>>      It makes the entire distro look unmaintained.
>
> Yeah. Stable. Hehe...
>
> The problem with the entire webpage is that is coded in an extremely obscure
> way. It is probably easier to 100% replace it from scratch than to modify and
> improve it. Yes, I've tried to analyze once how e.g. the table of blog posts
> or the GLSA announcements on the main page come together.
>
> My personal suggestion would be to code an internal replacement and
> transparently port more and more pages to it (as a change mostly invisible
> from outside, with two content management systems running concurrently for a
> transition period). Once the transition is complete, improvements can be made
> in a more sweeping way.
>
> How to do this, however, and what software to target should probably be
> decided by people who know more than me... and in the end it all boils down to
> "who has the time and motivation".

Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing
this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us
actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.

>
>
>>   2. Nowhere is it actually spelled out how to become a developer.
>>      Let's google "how to become a gentoo developer." This takes me
>>      to...
>>
>> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2
>>
>>      which as far as I know, is complete bullshit. I should look for an
>>      opening in the monthly newsletter? Really? Or in #gentoo-bugs?
>
> That page BADLY needs an update. It should however probably also reflect
> reality in the sense that you cannot really "apply to become a developer".
> What you can do is help out, be useful, get noticed, and be offered the job.
> (That at least is my personal impression on how it works.)

Different devs got involved it totally different ways. But yes, you
need to get involved in a team to get noticed and understand how
things work. That a fairly good start. The fact that there are
hundreds of different ways to reach a point where a recruiter picks
you for interview makes it hard to document it.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing
> this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us
> actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.

If we have funds for this kind of thing, the PSF process is a good example:

http://pythonorg-redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

(And I think that would be a great idea.)

Cheers,

Dirkjan

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 17 December 2012 12:31, Dirkjan Ochtman <djc@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing
>> this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us
>> actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.
>
> If we have funds for this kind of thing, the PSF process is a good example:
>
> http://pythonorg-redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
>
> (And I think that would be a great idea.)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dirkjan
>

I believe this is something that this[1] project needs to decide and
set it in motion.

[1]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/website.xml

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Roy Bamford]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2406 bytes --]

On 2012.12.17 15:15, Markos Chandras wrote:
> On 17 December 2012 12:31, Dirkjan Ochtman <djc@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Markos Chandras
> <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in 
> doing
> >> this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us
> >> actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.
> >
> > If we have funds for this kind of thing, the PSF process is a good
> example:
> >
> > http://pythonorg-redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
> >
> > (And I think that would be a great idea.)
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Dirkjan
> >
> 
> I believe this is something that this[1] project needs to decide and
> set it in motion.
> 
> [1]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/website.xml
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2
> 
> 
> 

To make this project a suitable project for Foundation funding, it 
needs a clearly defined specification that can be circulated for 
interested parties to provide fixed price quotations against.

The specification provides several things:-
1. the scope of work (out of scope work is extra cost)
2. the basis to judge completion (so we pay the fee)
3. some guidance as to implementation details

I know that 3. is unusual in a requirement specification but in this 
case it is unlikely that the Foundation would fund ongoing 
mainatainace, so we would need to dictate a few implementation details.
e.g. no Flash, Gentoo colours,

Its worth contrasting this sort of thing with a bug bounty.  The 
requirement is easy - fix the bug. Judging completion is fairly 
straight forward too. The patch is accepted by $UPSTREAM. 
The requirement specification for a website is a lot of work by 
comparison.

Suppose the team in [1] above wrote the specification, who needs to 
agree it?

The council, the trustees, the body of devs ... some combination of 
that list.  All in all, producing an agreed specification for a website 
it probably as much work as actually building the site. It could easily 
be as much work as the PMS. 

Anyway, I'm rambling a little.
In summary, if we decide to outsource the website project, it needs to 
be carefully controlled.

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
elections
gentoo-ops
forum-mods
trustees

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Suppose the team in [1] above wrote the specification, who needs to
> agree it?
>
> The council, the trustees, the body of devs ... some combination of
> that list.  All in all, producing an agreed specification for a website
> it probably as much work as actually building the site. It could easily
> be as much work as the PMS.

I don't think the whole body of devs has to agree to it. The trustees
definitely have to, since they have to fork over the cash. The council
probably also makes sense.

I think producing a specification for the website would be much work,
but work to which most of us would probably more suited than the work
of actually building the site. Building a good site is a lot of hard
work, too.

Is the website team actually active these days?

Cheers,

Dirkjan

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Dirkjan Ochtman <djc@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Suppose the team in [1] above wrote the specification, who needs to
>> agree it?
>>
>
> I don't think the whole body of devs has to agree to it. The trustees
> definitely have to, since they have to fork over the cash. The council
> probably also makes sense.

Most logical thing is for the website team to get together and suggest
something, and then can work with the rest of the devs to gather input
as they see fit.  They can then put together a proposal for the
trustees.  Generally speaking as long as the website team has done
reasonable due diligence we aren't going to shoot holes in it.  That
would be about as productive as getting into a debate with the infra
team about how many data centers we want to have hardware in, etc.

Those who care should step up and join the appropriate project.  Those
who don't care that much should try not to get in the way in the name
of offering advice.

The biggest thing the trustees are likely to help with are ensuring
we've done due diligence around bids/etc.  Generally funding requests
involve all of a few emails and a vote - this should be no different
as we shouldn't be contemplating some $20k development project.

>
> Is the website team actually active these days?

I think that should be our focus.  Rather than just going back and
forth about all the wonderful things that could happen if somebody
actually cared about our website, we need people to actually step up
and be willing to do something about it.

Our website is at least functional for the moment.  It certainly could
be better, but it takes more than dollars to make that happen.  We
can't pay people to care.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:43 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing
> this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us
> actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.

Before we considered undertaking this, we need somebody with a
long-term Gentoo commitment (preferably a dev or docs team member, or
even forum moderators or similar role) who would be in a leadership
position.  You don't just hire somebody and point them at your website
and say, "make it better."  I'd like to see somebody with
passion/vision leading this rather than the collective groans of the
mailing lists (valid as they may be).

To be useful it needs to be maintained as well.

If bringing in a professional is what it takes to get us over the hump
into sustainability then I'm all for it.  However, I don't think we
have all our bases covered yet.  We might find that once we address
the long-term care of our site the need to bring in a professional
goes away. However, if we get a vibrant team together to care for the
site I'm sure the Trustees will weigh their recommendations heavily.
We generally don't bikeshed - if infra says they need to replace a
hard drive we pay for it.  If the web site had a similar team caring
for it I'm sure we'd work with them, and likely let them lead the
interviews as well.

As a volunteer distro the first preference is of course that we fix
things ourselves.  However, I fully recognize that good web
development is a skillset.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 17 December 2012 14:08, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 5:43 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing
>> this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us
>> actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.
>
> Before we considered undertaking this, we need somebody with a
> long-term Gentoo commitment (preferably a dev or docs team member, or
> even forum moderators or similar role) who would be in a leadership
> position.  You don't just hire somebody and point them at your website
> and say, "make it better."  I'd like to see somebody with
> passion/vision leading this rather than the collective groans of the
> mailing lists (valid as they may be).

Ehm I never said to blindly assign this task to someone. This is why I
said that the website project[1] should take initiative here :)

[1]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/website.xml

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 10:43 Mon 17 Dec     , Markos Chandras wrote:
> On 16 December 2012 18:53, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > How to do this, however, and what software to target should probably 
> > be decided by people who know more than me... and in the end it all 
> > boils down to "who has the time and motivation".
> 
> Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing 
> this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us 
> actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.

I did much of the design work nearly 2 years ago:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_black.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_install.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_handbook.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_handbook2.png

Some early work on it using Bootstrap:

http://a3li.li/~alex/g.o/

That said, why the hell are we wasting time implementing our own website 
backend when we should be using a CMS? We're here to make a distro, not 
a website framework. No reason we should care, day to day, about 
anything but frontend theming and content.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Roy Bamford]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1865 bytes --]

On 2013.01.05 05:47, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 10:43 Mon 17 Dec     , Markos Chandras wrote:
> > On 16 December 2012 18:53, Andreas K. Huettel 
> <dilfridge@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> > > How to do this, however, and what software to target should
> probably 
> > > be decided by people who know more than me... and in the end it
> all 
> > > boils down to "who has the time and motivation".
> > 
> > Outsource it to someone who has the knowledge and interest in doing 
> > this. The foundation has the funds to support it, and none of us 
> > actually have the time to invest in a complete webpage redesign.
> 
> I did much of the design work nearly 2 years ago:
> 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/
> gentoo_landing_black.png
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/
> gentoo_landing_install.png
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/
> gentoo_landing_handbook.png
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/
> gentoo_landing_handbook2.png
> 
> Some early work on it using Bootstrap:
> 
> http://a3li.li/~alex/g.o/
> 
> That said, why the hell are we wasting time implementing our own
> website 
> backend when we should be using a CMS? We're here to make a distro,
> not 
> a website framework. No reason we should care, day to day, about 
> anything but frontend theming and content.
> 
> -- 
> Thanks,
> Donnie
> 
> Donnie Berkholz
> Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
> Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>
> 
Donnie.

We make our own website framework for the same reason that everything 
else happens in Gentoo.  Someone is interested in doing it.

I agree its not 'core business' but Gentoo isn't a business.

-- 

Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
elections
gentoo-ops
forum-mods
trustees

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Andreas K. Huettel]

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Am Samstag, 5. Januar 2013, 16:46:07 schrieb Roy Bamford:

> > That said, why the hell are we wasting time implementing our own
> > website
> > backend when we should be using a CMS? We're here to make a distro,
> > not
> > a website framework. No reason we should care, day to day, about
> > anything but frontend theming and content.
> 
> Donnie.
> 
> We make our own website framework for the same reason that everything
> else happens in Gentoo.  Someone is interested in doing it.
> 
> I agree its not 'core business' but Gentoo isn't a business.

Even if you're not a business you should care about maintainable solutions.

-- 
Andreas K. Huettel
Gentoo Linux developer 
dilfridge@gentoo.org
http://www.akhuettel.de/

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 9:03 AM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Am Samstag, 5. Januar 2013, 16:46:07 schrieb Roy Bamford:
>
>> > That said, why the hell are we wasting time implementing our own
>> > website
>> > backend when we should be using a CMS? We're here to make a distro,
>> > not
>> > a website framework. No reason we should care, day to day, about
>> > anything but frontend theming and content.
>>
>> Donnie.
>>
>> We make our own website framework for the same reason that everything
>> else happens in Gentoo.  Someone is interested in doing it.
>>
>> I agree its not 'core business' but Gentoo isn't a business.
>
> Even if you're not a business you should care about maintainable solutions.

I'm sure at the time it was created (12+ years ago) the website looked
pretty maintainable :)

-A

>
> --
> Andreas K. Huettel
> Gentoo Linux developer
> dilfridge@gentoo.org
> http://www.akhuettel.de/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 9:03 AM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Even if you're not a business you should care about maintainable solutions.
>
> I'm sure at the time it was created (12+ years ago) the website looked
> pretty maintainable :)

Hence the reason we should strongly consider a mainstream CMS.

I don't have a problem with somebody wanting to spend a lot of time
making something fancy for us - we're all volunteers.  The problem is
that the satisfaction of having built something new and shiny tends to
wear off, and then it ends up having to be maintained by people who
could care less how fancy the engine behind it is.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Aaron Bauman]

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On Saturday 05 January 2013 15:29:05 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 9:03 AM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@gentoo.org> 
wrote:
> >> Even if you're not a business you should care about maintainable
> >> solutions.
> > 
> > I'm sure at the time it was created (12+ years ago) the website looked
> > pretty maintainable :)
> 
> Hence the reason we should strongly consider a mainstream CMS.
> 
> I don't have a problem with somebody wanting to spend a lot of time
> making something fancy for us - we're all volunteers.  The problem is
> that the satisfaction of having built something new and shiny tends to
> wear off, and then it ends up having to be maintained by people who
> could care less how fancy the engine behind it is.
> 
> Rich

This, "The problem is that the satisfaction of having built something new and 
shiny tends to wear off, and then it ends up having to be maintained by people 
who could care less how fancy the engine behind it is."

Aaron

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 18:03 Sat 05 Jan     , Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> Am Samstag, 5. Januar 2013, 16:46:07 schrieb Roy Bamford:
> > I agree its not 'core business' but Gentoo isn't a business.
> 
> Even if you're not a business you should care about maintainable solutions.

More importantly, even if you aren't a business (although we are, 
technically, albeit a not-for-profit one), you should still have a 
mission that you're focused on accomplishing. Otherwise you can justify 
anything in the context of Gentoo, when in reality we need to limit our 
scope to increase our impact.

I actually suspect this is a byproduct of Gentoo being many 
contributors' first OSS development experiences. They're nervous to 
branch out on their own w/ e.g. a GitHub repo so they initiate 
*everything* under the Gentoo umbrella.

I would argue that defining a clear vision and audience for Gentoo would 
significantly increase our ability to get useful things done.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 01/05/2013 12:47 AM, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
> Some early work on it using Bootstrap:
> 
> http://a3li.li/~alex/g.o/
> 

I really like this. The (admittedly kind-of ugly) logo and the flying
saucer thing are incorporated tastefully and it makes a big difference.

The zebra tables, and especially the security updates, look great. The
heading fonts are well-chosen. The amount of whitespace is just right.

If I had one criticism, it would be that the leading (i.e. line-height)
in the main content should be proportional to the length of the line
(ideally, the column width would also be capped between e.g. 40-50em).
But that's a minor issue; the entire look is a massive improvement.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

["Paweł Hajdan, Jr."]

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On 1/4/13 9:47 PM, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I did much of the design work nearly 2 years ago:
> 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_black.png
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_install.png
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_handbook.png
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/gentoo_website/gentoo_landing_handbook2.png
> 
> Some early work on it using Bootstrap:
> 
> http://a3li.li/~alex/g.o/

This looks good to me!

> That said, why the hell are we wasting time implementing our own website 
> backend when we should be using a CMS? We're here to make a distro, not 
> a website framework. No reason we should care, day to day, about 
> anything but frontend theming and content.

+1

Paweł


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation

Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean?

>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.

Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue

>      would suspect that anything has changed, though, since the
>      homepage hasn't since before I could drink beer.
>
>      It makes the entire distro look unmaintained.
Note quite. The activity of a distro is measure but the # of devs,
packages in tree, activity on bugzilla and mailing lists etc. The
design of a website does not
really say much. Many foss projects still have static html pages. This
does not mean they are dead.

The pr@ team recently did a survey for the website etc. You may want
to ask them what happened and what's their plan.
>
>   2. Nowhere is it actually spelled out how to become a developer.
>      Let's google "how to become a gentoo developer." This takes me
>      to...
>
>> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2
>
>      which as far as I know, is complete bullshit. I should look for an
>      opening in the monthly newsletter? Really? Or in #gentoo-bugs?
Parts of this docs are outdated but this does not matter. Get
involved, fix bugs, help people and someone will ask you to join. Or
look for a mentor.

>
>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
>
I believe this is Irrelevant

> All three of those problems are boring and will suck to fix -- perfect
> candidates for bug bounties.

I don't like the attitude "pay in order to happen". This is a foss
project, so people are supposed to
see this as a hobby or a learning experience. It is not a job ;)
Things are supposed to happen because they are fun

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Mol]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
>> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
>
> Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean?
>
>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.
>
> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue

What's not really true? That it's the most stable? or that people
think of it as a ricer distro?

I face funroll-loops references and worse almost every time I bring up
Gentoo among a different group of Linux-familiar technical people.
There are still *very* strong prejudices against Gentoo in most places
I've brought it up. But when I bring it up, and I argue against those
funroll-loops references, one or two people come out of lurking and
admit that they use it...and it's a surprise to people around them.

I've started describing it as a "coming out of the closet" experience
for a reason... There's a _serious_ reputation issue that Gentoo still
hasn't completely sloughed off...which is incredibly sad. Of all the
distros I've used, I've come to the conclusion that Gentoo is the
easily nicest for almost anyone even moderately technical.

--
:wq

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Alec Warner]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>>> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
>>> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
>>
>> Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean?
>>
>>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.
>>
>> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue
>
> What's not really true? That it's the most stable? or that people
> think of it as a ricer distro?

Its a rolling distro; compared to static release distros (Ubuntu LTS,
Debian Stable) it is not even close to the most stable because it
changes frequently.

>
> I face funroll-loops references and worse almost every time I bring up
> Gentoo among a different group of Linux-familiar technical people.
> There are still *very* strong prejudices against Gentoo in most places
> I've brought it up. But when I bring it up, and I argue against those
> funroll-loops references, one or two people come out of lurking and
> admit that they use it...and it's a surprise to people around them.

I've encountered different anecdotes; but in the end that is all they
are. Many technical people I encounter say they used Gentoo at one
time or another, learned a lot, then moved on to new things.

>
> I've started describing it as a "coming out of the closet" experience
> for a reason... There's a _serious_ reputation issue that Gentoo still
> hasn't completely sloughed off...which is incredibly sad. Of all the
> distros I've used, I've come to the conclusion that Gentoo is the
> easily nicest for almost anyone even moderately technical.

At least in the working world, most technical people just want to get
things done; Linux is just one tool in their toolbox for doing this.
Most of them don't want to spent time messing with their distro; they
just want things to work out of the box, configured the way they like
(and I don't mean USE flags in this context, I mean the UI.)

>
> --
> :wq
>

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 16 December 2012 19:14, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.
>>
>> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue
>
> What's not really true? That it's the most stable? or that people
> think of it as a ricer distro?
>

It is definitely not the most stable. You can't even compare a rolling
release distro with other distros when it comes to stability. It is
just not possible. In order to have something stable, first you need
to test a well-defined set of packages, then declare them (tag them)
as stable, then have a dedicated team, tracking this tree, and fix
potential bugs that may pop up. People may complain that Debian stable
and Centos have ancient packages, but this is expected and it is a
compromise between cutting-edge distro vs stability.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 14:14:49 -0500
Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:

> I face funroll-loops references and worse almost every time I bring up
> Gentoo among a different group of Linux-familiar technical people.
> There are still *very* strong prejudices against Gentoo in most places

Comparing Gentoo to "binary" Linux distros is simply using the wrong
analogy. I use Gentoo/Linux the way other people use some BSD with
ports - this is where Gentoo stands out, and compiler flags have little
to do with it. Build time configuration does. You pick a development
base, build and install packages you want on top of that, and you end
up running a stable system for years that is relatively easy to patch
up as and when needed.

The difference between many other ports-like distros and Gentoo is that
it is usually very well possible to do rolling upgrades and we make
that difference by ensuring a neverending progression from unstable to
stable, instead of calling a freeze every so often and picking up new
developments for future "stable" releases.

> I've brought it up. But when I bring it up, and I argue against those
> funroll-loops references, one or two people come out of lurking and
> admit that they use it...and it's a surprise to people around them.

There you go! Just explain that compiler optimisation is not the reason
you use it. Then you should have their attention and you can start to
explain the actual reasons you use it. It may make them feel rather
stupid about the "plonk in the CD and roll with it" attitude that they
must have picked up from some antiquated locked-down distro[1]. :)

> I've started describing it as a "coming out of the closet" experience
> for a reason... There's a _serious_ reputation issue that Gentoo still
> hasn't completely sloughed off...which is incredibly sad.

The same reputation issue that FreeBSD and OpenBSD have, no doubt.

> :wq

There is an app for that:
alias :wq='echo "OK, I quit!"'


     jer


[1] Heck, nowadays even Windows and Mac OS X support several ports-like
    source-based software distros, despite sandboxed, walled-gardened
    "app stores" for people who find it easier to pay for stuff than to
    wonder how to get the software they need for free. And that's
    entirely fair: it's a design/implementation decision everyone has
    to make according to their own needs, expectations, limitations and
    experience.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/16/12 14:04, Markos Chandras wrote:
> On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
>> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
> 
> Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean?
> 
>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.
> 
> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue
> 

The first part is definitely true. The stable part is also true in my
experience, all things considered. For an example, take the last "what's
your favorite distro" post on Reddit (not exactly a representative
sample, I know):

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/14tpnt/of_all_the_distros_youve_ever_used_what_do_you/

Top rated comment:

  "Tie between Arch and Gentoo. These are my "messing around" distros.
   Fun to install and tweak on older machines, but I don't know enough
   about them to use them full time. Plus, Gentoo breaks. A lot. Arch
   breaks much more often than Debian for me but much less than Gentoo."

Further down:

  "Gentoo is not stable. Stop saying that."

My experience mirrors Michael Mol's. Perception is bad. Reality not so much.


> Note quite. The activity of a distro is measure but the # of devs,
> packages in tree, activity on bugzilla and mailing lists etc. The
> design of a website does not
> really say much. Many foss projects still have static html pages. This
> does not mean they are dead.

The actual activity, yes. The perceived activity... eh. And that's what
gets you new users and developers.


> Parts of this docs are outdated but this does not matter. Get
> involved, fix bugs, help people and someone will ask you to join. Or
> look for a mentor.

If your recruitment process is "fix bugs for years and maybe someone
will notice you, maybe not," then nobody is going to bother. There needs
to be a clear, step-by-step process. This guy posted a graph the other day:

http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org/wp-content/uploads/recruitment_stats.png

People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental problem --
it's because the process is obscure and potentially a waste of time.


> 
>>
>>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
>>
> I believe this is Irrelevant
> 

It's the least important of the three probably. The (lack of)
recruitment process is the biggest problem.


> 
> I don't like the attitude "pay in order to happen". This is a foss
> project, so people are supposed to
> see this as a hobby or a learning experience. It is not a job ;)
> Things are supposed to happen because they are fun
> 

You would be perfect for training new developers. Feel free to decline
your salary =)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Patrick Lauer]

On 12/17/12 08:10, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 12/16/12 14:04, Markos Chandras wrote:
>> On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>>> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
>>> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
>>
>> Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean?
>>
>>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.
>>
>> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue
>>
> 
> The first part is definitely true. The stable part is also true in my
> experience, all things considered. For an example, take the last "what's
> your favorite distro" post on Reddit (not exactly a representative
> sample, I know):
> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/14tpnt/of_all_the_distros_youve_ever_used_what_do_you/
> 
> Top rated comment:
> 
>   "Tie between Arch and Gentoo. These are my "messing around" distros.
>    Fun to install and tweak on older machines, but I don't know enough
>    about them to use them full time. Plus, Gentoo breaks. A lot. Arch
>    breaks much more often than Debian for me but much less than Gentoo."
> 
> Further down:
> 
>   "Gentoo is not stable. Stop saying that."
> 
> My experience mirrors Michael Mol's. Perception is bad. Reality not so much.

And then you look what people do to get to that conclusion ...

"I unmasked gcc-4.8, migrated back to glibc-2.5 so I could build
binaries for CentOS 5, and started from a sabayon install because it's
easier. My CFLAGS include make-faster things like -ffast-math and -O8"

Plus people don't look at warnings unless they are interactive prompts
that ask them so answer a question about the warning. So yeah, if you
hit things with a hammer they break. And we make it easy for people to
do that :)

On the other hand I could tell you about "Enterprise Distros" that patch
their gcc so badly that it is confused about its version, and many other
funny things.

Everything breaks at some point, I started using Gentoo because I was
able to fix that breakage, thus enabling me to use my computer instead
of just ranting about it. Internally, I think, we're doing ok, now we
just need to make our PR effective again (which has been an ongoing
project for half a decade ...)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Brian Dolbec]

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On Sun, 2012-12-16 at 19:10 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 12/16/12 14:04, Markos Chandras wrote:
<snip>...
>  This guy posted a graph the other day:
> 
> http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org/wp-content/uploads/recruitment_stats.png
> 

HA, HA, that's a good one...  quote the the above link to the guy that
created and posted it in the first place  :D


> People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental problem --
> it's because the process is obscure and potentially a waste of time.
> 
> 
> > 
> >>
> >>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
> >>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
> >>
> > I believe this is Irrelevant
> > 
> 
> It's the least important of the three probably. The (lack of)
> recruitment process is the biggest problem.
> 
> 

The git migration is making progress.  It is nearly there.  From what I
know, there are a few things holding it up right now...

1) one of the main dev's working on it has had a computer failure and
busy work schedule.

2) waiting for me to code the new gentoo-keys project which will manage
the gpg keyrings needed and some code for the git commit validation
hooks which which check every commit pushed to the main tree.
I'm working on it :)  but I also have to work to feed my family, etc..

3) with the above done and ready. a final schedule to perform the
migration with a minimum of disruption.

So, not only is the tree moving to git, it's getting some needed
upgrades in the process.



-- 
Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 17 December 2012 00:10, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 12/16/12 14:04, Markos Chandras wrote:
>> On 16 December 2012 16:57, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>>> Inspired by the number of packages being unmaintained -- why not use
>>> some of that bug bounty money to fix up the recruitment documentation
>>
>> Recruitment documentatiob? What does that mean?
>>
>>>      People still think of Gentoo as a ricer distro that's broken all
>>>      the time, when in reality, it's one of the most stable.
>>
>> Well that's not entirely true but that's a different issue
>>
>
> The first part is definitely true. The stable part is also true in my
> experience, all things considered. For an example, take the last "what's
> your favorite distro" post on Reddit (not exactly a representative
> sample, I know):
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/14tpnt/of_all_the_distros_youve_ever_used_what_do_you/
>
> Top rated comment:
>
>   "Tie between Arch and Gentoo. These are my "messing around" distros.
>    Fun to install and tweak on older machines, but I don't know enough
>    about them to use them full time. Plus, Gentoo breaks. A lot. Arch
>    breaks much more often than Debian for me but much less than Gentoo."
>
> Further down:
>
>   "Gentoo is not stable. Stop saying that."
>
> My experience mirrors Michael Mol's. Perception is bad. Reality not so much.

I don't care much about what a website may say or not. Truth is Gentoo
is a rolling release so you can't expect much when it comes to
stability. But we are trying our best though

>
>
>> Note quite. The activity of a distro is measure but the # of devs,
>> packages in tree, activity on bugzilla and mailing lists etc. The
>> design of a website does not
>> really say much. Many foss projects still have static html pages. This
>> does not mean they are dead.
>
> The actual activity, yes. The perceived activity... eh. And that's what
> gets you new users and developers.

The perceived activity is certainly not measured by the website. The
numbers of fixed bugs, version bumps etc is a good indication to
measure the activity of such projects. Honestly, I rarely visit the
website of the projects I use. I only read the RSS just to see if
something new is happening.

>
>
>> Parts of this docs are outdated but this does not matter. Get
>> involved, fix bugs, help people and someone will ask you to join. Or
>> look for a mentor.
>
> If your recruitment process is "fix bugs for years and maybe someone
> will notice you, maybe not," then nobody is going to bother. There needs
> to be a clear, step-by-step process. This guy posted a graph the other day:
>
> http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org/wp-content/uploads/recruitment_stats.png
>
> People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental problem --
> it's because the process is obscure and potentially a waste of time.

I posted that. The reason they don't bother is because the actual
*recruitment* process sucks and takes too much time. The contributors
are there, we have many of them, just getting them on board requires
time that many of them don't have. It is one of the reasons we formed
the proxy-maintainers project.

>>>   3. Get off CVS for Christ's sake. Nobody wants to work with that. I
>>>      don't know how this fits into my bullet list, but it's important.
>>>
>> I believe this is Irrelevant
>>
>
> It's the least important of the three probably. The (lack of)
> recruitment process is the biggest problem.

Again, there is no lack of recruitment process. It just takes time.
Ask all these people who joined the project in the last year.

>>
>> I don't like the attitude "pay in order to happen". This is a foss
>> project, so people are supposed to
>> see this as a hobby or a learning experience. It is not a job ;)
>> Things are supposed to happen because they are fun
>>
>
> You would be perfect for training new developers. Feel free to decline
> your salary =)
>

I already do that ;)


-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michał Górny]

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On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:10:06 -0500
Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:

> > Parts of this docs are outdated but this does not matter. Get
> > involved, fix bugs, help people and someone will ask you to join. Or
> > look for a mentor.
> 
> If your recruitment process is "fix bugs for years and maybe someone
> will notice you, maybe not," then nobody is going to bother. There needs
> to be a clear, step-by-step process. This guy posted a graph the other day:
> 
> http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org/wp-content/uploads/recruitment_stats.png

I don't think a single graph is 'good enough' for the complexity
of the problem. I probably do count to the 'gave up' no in the earlier
years, yet I finally made it the other year. I wonder how many others
like me are there.

> People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental problem --
> it's because the process is obscure and potentially a waste of time.

I agree with that. The process takes a lot of time for a minor benefit,
and most of it doesn't prove really helpful. I think the process should
mostly prove that someone is able to find and read docs, write ebuilds
and understand the major concepts.

Honestly, I see no reason to ask recruits for a lot of things we do
right now. There's no point in telling them to summarize a large piece
of the docs. From my personal experience, there is a lot of things which
you learn and then forget because you don't need them for a long time.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 17 December 2012 09:40, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:10:06 -0500
> Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>
>> > Parts of this docs are outdated but this does not matter. Get
>> > involved, fix bugs, help people and someone will ask you to join. Or
>> > look for a mentor.
>>
>> If your recruitment process is "fix bugs for years and maybe someone
>> will notice you, maybe not," then nobody is going to bother. There needs
>> to be a clear, step-by-step process. This guy posted a graph the other day:
>>
>> http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org/wp-content/uploads/recruitment_stats.png
>
> I don't think a single graph is 'good enough' for the complexity
> of the problem. I probably do count to the 'gave up' no in the earlier
> years, yet I finally made it the other year. I wonder how many others
> like me are there.
>
>> People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental problem --
>> it's because the process is obscure and potentially a waste of time.
>
> I agree with that. The process takes a lot of time for a minor benefit,
> and most of it doesn't prove really helpful. I think the process should
> mostly prove that someone is able to find and read docs, write ebuilds
> and understand the major concepts.
>
> Honestly, I see no reason to ask recruits for a lot of things we do
> right now. There's no point in telling them to summarize a large piece
> of the docs. From my personal experience, there is a lot of things which
> you learn and then forget because you don't need them for a long time.
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny

Somehow you need to make sure they actually read part of the docs and
they will not commit random bits just because they though "this was
the correct way to do it". We are all people, and sometimes it's
easier to assume something is right than actually investigating
whether your assumption was right or not. And frankly, many mentors
nowadays don't pay much attention in training their recruits. They
just do a very limited quiz review and hand them to recruiters. I have
interviewed a few people where they did not know basic stuff, like
local use flags go to metadata.xml and not local.use.desc anymore etc
and that's because their mentors did a very very bad job in preparing
them. Be a responsible mentor, train them well, and the recruitment
will be much faster than you might expect.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:40:06 +0100
Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> > People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental
> > problem -- it's because the process is obscure and potentially a
> > waste of time.
> 
> I agree with that. The process takes a lot of time for a minor
> benefit, and most of it doesn't prove really helpful. I think the
> process should mostly prove that someone is able to find and read
> docs, write ebuilds and understand the major concepts.

Please show me some numbers that prove your point about the recruitment process
having "little benefit".

> Honestly, I see no reason to ask recruits for a lot of things we do
> right now. There's no point in telling them to summarize a large piece
> of the docs. From my personal experience, there is a lot of things
> which you learn and then forget because you don't need them for a
> long time.

I could go all cynical here and give a few examples of how a couple of people
recently got through and actually managed to mess up a few very basic
things you would never contemplate quizzing them about.

But I would much rather see to it that those few bits get fixed, rather than
the even greater mess we would be in if everybody with the "right mindset" got
commit privileges. Since nobody's perfect, we already have enough work to do,
thank you.


     jer

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michał Górny]

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On Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:56:56 +0100
Jeroen Roovers <jer@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:40:06 +0100
> Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > > People aren't bothering. It's not because of any fundamental
> > > problem -- it's because the process is obscure and potentially a
> > > waste of time.
> > 
> > I agree with that. The process takes a lot of time for a minor
> > benefit, and most of it doesn't prove really helpful. I think the
> > process should mostly prove that someone is able to find and read
> > docs, write ebuilds and understand the major concepts.
> 
> Please show me some numbers that prove your point about the recruitment process
> having "little benefit".

Opinions don't come with numbers.

> > Honestly, I see no reason to ask recruits for a lot of things we do
> > right now. There's no point in telling them to summarize a large piece
> > of the docs. From my personal experience, there is a lot of things
> > which you learn and then forget because you don't need them for a
> > long time.
> 
> I could go all cynical here and give a few examples of how a couple of people
> recently got through and actually managed to mess up a few very basic
> things you would never contemplate quizzing them about.
> 
> But I would much rather see to it that those few bits get fixed, rather than
> the even greater mess we would be in if everybody with the "right mindset" got
> commit privileges. Since nobody's perfect, we already have enough work to do,
> thank you.

Doesn't this prove that the recruitment process fails to work?

If I were to throw random ideas, I'd think about letting new recruits
did all commits through a proxy (mentor?). Of course, it all would be
easier if we used git.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Markos Chandras]

On 19 December 2012 09:03, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Of course, it all would be
> easier if we used git.

Please lets not hijack yet another thread with the git migration.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Kent Fredric]

On 19/12/2012 10:03 p.m., Michał Górny wrote:
> Doesn't this prove that the recruitment process fails to work?
>
> If I were to throw random ideas, I'd think about letting new recruits
> did all commits through a proxy (mentor?). Of course, it all would be
> easier if we used git.
>

I know this side question of "git" migration is one we want to avoid 
discussing, I know its in progress.

But I am literally waiting for it to happen, because for whatever 
reason, the present barriers to contribution are too high for me without it.

I can't put an exact finger on it, but devs seem to think the quiz 
methodology is "easy", but it ( oh, and CVS ) are a high barrier to 
entry for me.

I don't have the time/motivation/focus required to commit to even 
completing the quizzes, and I don't have the time/motivation/focus 
really required to be a "full dev", and I don't even want to be a "Full 
dev" really.

But I basically have found every time I've done the quiz, its eventually 
boiled down to a cycle of

1. Read quiz
2. Find it hard to find documentation on
3. Search for
4. Get lost
5. Find the resulting information I eventually find is vague and 
confusing with regard to the question.
6. Eventually get distracted and do something other than the rest of the 
quiz.

I know, it should be easy, and I'm probably making excuses, but it boils 
down to

1. People in Gentoo have asked me to/encouraged me to do the quizzes
2. I've tried several times
3. Still not there.
4. This problem is not so prevalent in the dozens of other projects I've 
contributed to.

As soon as Git migration is done, then I can just

1. Fork
2. Hack
3. Somebody can watch/review/cherry-pick commits I make if they like 
them, if not, I'm not worried.

But the git part aside, back to the quiz.

Surely, I'm not the /only/ person to get roadblocked by the quiz.

The only thing really keeping me around as a half-assed dev is the fact 
we have overlays and the fact that the overlays are git based, and I get 
/some/ notion of contributions being of value there.

Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound" 
repository until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull and 
trusted people can review submitted branches and apply them to CVS?

Because I feel its quite possible partly that CVS is due to blame ( due 
to requiring of trusted commit, which requires the questions ) that 
there is difficulty getting devs, and the longer we're stuck with it, 
the more it will be a problem.

It could actually be just the Proxy Maintainer workflow is not clear 
enough, or simple enough, and that we need more push towards a more 
heavy proxy-maintainer based system ( I don't know, I'm ignorant to too 
much of proxy-maintainer-ship stuff,  to discern /why/ that is might be 
difficult, but I'd imagine my ignorance is part of the problem )

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Thu, 27 Dec 2012 05:39:00 +1300
Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19/12/2012 10:03 p.m., Michał Górny wrote:
> > If I were to throw random ideas, I'd think about letting new
> > recruits did all commits through a proxy (mentor?). Of course, it
> > all would be easier if we used git.

For once someone suggests a single good case where git beats CVS for
portage tree changes: easily checking suggested changes ...

> I know this side question of "git" migration is one we want to avoid 
> discussing, I know its in progress.
> 
> But I am literally waiting for it to happen, because for whatever 
> reason, the present barriers to contribution are too high for me
> without it.

... and yet someone will always turn up, ignore the context, and write
another rant about git.

> I can't put an exact finger on it, but devs seem to think the quiz 
> methodology is "easy", but it ( oh, and CVS ) are a high barrier to 
> entry for me.

For tree commits, we don't use complex CVS features at all. It isn't and
shouldn't be used as a development repository, so you need to know about
`cvs {add,commit,remove}', mainly. Most of the `cvs commit' instances
are normally handled by repoman.

> I don't have the time/motivation/focus required to commit to even 
> completing the quizzes, and I don't have the time/motivation/focus 
> really required to be a "full dev", and I don't even want to be a
> "Full dev" really.
> 
> But I basically have found every time I've done the quiz, its
> eventually boiled down to a cycle of
> 
> 1. Read quiz
> 2. Find it hard to find documentation on
> 3. Search for
> 4. Get lost
> 5. Find the resulting information I eventually find is vague and 
> confusing with regard to the question.
> 6. Eventually get distracted and do something other than the rest of
> the quiz.

[More of the same...]

What you want to do is contact your mentor - that is the person who
should be able to point out where to find the actual answer or just
tell you what the answer is - the point of the quizes is to properly
teach you how things work, not how to find out how things work.

> Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound" 
> repository until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull
> and trusted people can review submitted branches and apply them to
> CVS?

You can mail or pastebin someone a diff right now or attach it to a bug
report. If every recruit/mentor team worked that way right now, we
would already catch a lot more problems much earlier.

> Because I feel its quite possible partly that CVS is due to blame
> ( due to requiring of trusted commit, which requires the questions )
> that there is difficulty getting devs, and the longer we're stuck
> with it, the more it will be a problem.

A shiny new workflow doesn't magically make Gentoo development easier.
The hard bits aren't usually related to interactive repo access methods.

We can't get rid of the quizes just because we all now use $shiny.

> 
> It could actually be just the Proxy Maintainer workflow is not clear 
> enough, or simple enough, and that we need more push towards a more 
> heavy proxy-maintainer based system ( I don't know, I'm ignorant to
> too much of proxy-maintainer-ship stuff,  to discern /why/ that is
> might be difficult, but I'd imagine my ignorance is part of the
> problem )

Proxy commits should work exactly like recruit/mentor commits: you
review patches and give the nod and then the commits get done. This
workflow is only slightly less convenient with CVS than with git.



     jer


---
I could be a brilliant programmer if someone wrote the perfect IDE for
me.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Peter Stuge]

Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> For once someone suggests a single good case where git beats CVS for
> portage tree changes: easily checking suggested changes ...

Did you look at Gerrit one of the many times I mentioned it already?

That is what it is for, and it is pretty great.


> A shiny new workflow doesn't magically make Gentoo development easier.

Actually it does. It doesn't make hard things easy, but it does make
things which are currently hard but which *should* actually be easy
indeed be easy. Such as contributing commits for tested bumps, and
tested bugfixes.

Even if you might not think so, there is quite significant overhead
for patches which sit in bugzilla compared to a Gerrit in front of a
git repo. You really need to try it, and really want to learn Gerrit,
to discover just how well it works.

End result:

Contributors can work independently and then send their work in with
*zero* overhead. Do not underestimate the importance of this.

Developers with portage tree write access review commits and can
apply them to portage, or discard them, with a single click or with
a single SSH command.


> The hard bits aren't usually related to interactive repo access methods.

It was argued that the hard bits are only learned by mentoring. I
think this makes sense, and I think it has nothing whatsoever to do
with commit workflow. There are PLENTY of TRIVIAL NO-BRAINER
contributions which are NOT GETTING INTO PORTAGE. Let's not worry
about optimizing the really difficult problems until all the really
simple problems have all been solved.


> We can't get rid of the quizes just because we all now use $shiny.

Actually we can.


> Proxy commits should work exactly like recruit/mentor commits: you
> review patches and give the nod and then the commits get done. This
> workflow is only slightly less convenient with CVS than with git.

I really recommend spending some time on learning Gerrit if you
haven't used it already.


//Peter

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Kent Fredric]

On 27 December 2012 13:32, Jeroen Roovers <jer@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> What you want to do is contact your mentor - that is the person who
> should be able to point out where to find the actual answer or just
> tell you what the answer is - the point of the quizes is to properly
> teach you how things work, not how to find out how things work.

This poses a logistics problem Imo, because it requires time-bound
dedication from a mentor, and it is an incredibly synchronous sort of
behaviour.  Its good that a mentor can do this, but IMO, needing to
contact a gentoo dev to ask a question that could be easily answered
by clearer documentation, suggests that there is room for improvement
in the documentation.

( Exactly how to improve documentation to be more accessible is of
course a hugely challenging issue )

> You can mail or pastebin someone a diff right now or attach it to a bug
> report. If every recruit/mentor team worked that way right now, we
> would already catch a lot more problems much earlier.

"Mail" a bug report, and anything that results in  scm + diff -> email
-> scm + diff

offers a huge problem in terms of data being faithfully transported to me.

It may sound trivial, but if you're working on the target box over an
SSH connection, getting the patch in an email is not very fun.

pick one of ( diff + xclip + paste , diff + sftp + attach , diff +
samba + attach  ), and the other end having to do ( download
attachment / copy-paste-inline-diff ) -> ( get the diff in a file on a
machine somehow from email, and compare / apply to CVS )

^^^ is a very time consuming process filled with potential places for
things to go wrong , and this time consuming cost being associated
with *every* patch submission will greatly slow contribution.

I'm not saying "just use git", though, of course, this is where git
shines, because once you have a repository URI, receiving
contributions from that repository becomes incredibly simple.

There's no reason we /can't/ have a comparable process for CVS to
eliminate needless slopping of files around in pastebins/emails, both
of which are time consuming and not designed for doing exactly that.

ie: instead of "just use a pastebin", it might help to have a
formalised/approved pastebin tool that provides CVS diffs in a usable
form ( ie: records CVS commit the diff is based upon, generates diffs
with a consistent root point, generates diffs in a consistent format
instead of relying on the user to remember the right flags to diff ),
and then uploads those diffs to either an existing pastebin, or a
gentoo controlled one, and has a way of tracking patches for
application to ::gentoo so that people can review/reject submissions
and submitters can get automated feedback about submissions.

ie:

> repoman-submit -m "Update Foo to version x.y.z, etc"
## Your changes have been submitted as @gentoo/af6347
...
> repoman-review
* @gentoo/af6347 - Update Foo to version x.y.z
* @gentoo/afbeef  - Update Bar to version x.y.z

> EDITOR=vim repoman-review --show @gentoo/af6347
....
> repoman-review --reject @gentoo/af6347 -m "You have x problem y with blah"
> EDITOR=vim repoman-review --show @gentoo/afbeef
> repoman-review --accept @gentoo/afbeef
## @gentoo/afbeef commited to CVS


Yes. This is an oversimplified example. But I hope you see where I'm
going with it. The essential points are

1. Doesn't need manual interaction with EMail at any stage
2. Doesn't need manual interaction with a pastebin at any stage
3. Connectedness to bugzilla/email are entirely optional, and
emails/bugs should/could refer  to submissions in the queue.

And we don't *have* to use Git to get this sort of workflow benefits.

> A shiny new workflow doesn't magically make Gentoo development easier.
> The hard bits aren't usually related to interactive repo access methods.
>
> We can't get rid of the quizes just because we all now use $shiny.
>

It really does, it allows people to much more efficiently submit
changes to the tree that you wouldn't trust them to "Just do"
themselves, ( because they haven't done the quizzes ), but you would
trust an approved dev to review and commit.

>
> Proxy commits should work exactly like recruit/mentor commits: you
> review patches and give the nod and then the commits get done. This
> workflow is only slightly less convenient with CVS than with git.
>

Agreed, but there's no reason we /can't/ make the workflow more
convenient, and optimising the proxy/recruit contribution workflow
would not be something I'd consider "bad".

It just absolves us from having to do the  repetitive mundane parts of
the contribution process so we can spend more time focusing on the
contribution itself.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 1:30 AM, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
> There's no reason we /can't/ have a comparable process for CVS to
> eliminate needless slopping of files around in pastebins/emails, both
> of which are time consuming and not designed for doing exactly that.
>...
>(lots of descriptions of fancy tools to make cvs more bearable)

If people are looking to improve Gentoo's tools it would be far more
productive for them to help out with the git migration.  Can I stop
somebody from making gerrit-for-cvs?   No.  I won't even try - Gentoo
is about choice.  However, the fact is that git is the future, and
we're probably one of the only serious FOSS projects around still
using cvs (largely because it doesn't hamper us as much as it hampers
everybody else).

We're really not that far from having a working git implementation.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Patrick Lauer]

On 12/26/2012 05:39 PM, Kent Fredric wrote:
> I know, it should be easy, and I'm probably making excuses, but it boils
> down to
Well, it boils down to you needing an excuse ;)


> 1. People in Gentoo have asked me to/encouraged me to do the quizzes
> 2. I've tried several times
> 3. Still not there.
> 4. This problem is not so prevalent in the dozens of other projects I've
> contributed to.

If you tried several times you should have the notes from then, after a
few tries I expect you to reach full coverage of all questions at some
point ...

> As soon as Git migration is done, then I can just
> 
> 1. Fork
> 2. Hack
> 3. Somebody can watch/review/cherry-pick commits I make if they like
> them, if not, I'm not worried.
> 
> But the git part aside, back to the quiz.
> 
Right now you can:

1) publish overlay
2) profit

I don't see how this is in any way related to the technology used - as a
maintainer I'd still have to review the changes, and the difference
between some git magic and some shell magic eludes me.

The more difficult part imo is finding someone to review, provide
feedback etc. - once you have that figured out the rest pretty much
happens by itself

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Ben de Groot]

On 27 December 2012 00:39, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound" repository
> until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull and trusted people
> can review submitted branches and apply them to CVS?

This is why I started https://github.com/yngwin/proxy-maint/
Feel free to send pull requests my way. I have been very busy lately
with work, so I am a bit behind on my Gentoo stuff, but I should be back
in full swing soon.

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer
Gentoo Qt project lead, Gentoo Wiki admin

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Brian Dolbec]

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On Sat, 2012-12-29 at 16:42 +0800, Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 27 December 2012 00:39, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound" repository
> > until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull and trusted people
> > can review submitted branches and apply them to CVS?
> 
> This is why I started https://github.com/yngwin/proxy-maint/
> Feel free to send pull requests my way. I have been very busy lately
> with work, so I am a bit behind on my Gentoo stuff, but I should be back
> in full swing soon.
> 

Not to sidetrack the topic farther, but isn't this best done in our
github/gentoo account.  It is one of the main reasons we have it, to
easily accept pull requests from users.  It would also make it easier
for more devs to participate in a group proxy-maint repo.
-- 
Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Not to sidetrack the topic farther, but isn't this best done in our
> github/gentoo account.  It is one of the main reasons we have it, to
> easily accept pull requests from users.  It would also make it easier
> for more devs to participate in a group proxy-maint repo.

Very little Gentoo-related work on Github is actually done under the
Gentoo org.  I'm not really sure if this is a good thing or a bad
thing.  We haven't really figured out what we want to do with that
space.

I suspect some of it is that many devs just want to do their thing,
and github is a place where you can do whatever you want with your
overlay/etc and nobody else is going to tell you that you're doing it
wrong.  Again, not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Ben de Groot]

On 30 December 2012 00:13, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-12-29 at 16:42 +0800, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> On 27 December 2012 00:39, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound" repository
>> > until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull and trusted people
>> > can review submitted branches and apply them to CVS?
>>
>> This is why I started https://github.com/yngwin/proxy-maint/
>> Feel free to send pull requests my way. I have been very busy lately
>> with work, so I am a bit behind on my Gentoo stuff, but I should be back
>> in full swing soon.
>>
>
> Not to sidetrack the topic farther, but isn't this best done in our
> github/gentoo account.  It is one of the main reasons we have it, to
> easily accept pull requests from users.  It would also make it easier
> for more devs to participate in a group proxy-maint repo.

I started this repo as a private initiative to deal with some of my
proxy maintainers. If other devs find it useful, I'm happy to move it
to the Gentoo organization account on github.

Another reason I didn't do that so far, is that I was told infra is
looking into setting up an integral solution to mirror our official
overlays on github. It's been a while though, so it would be nice to
hear some news on that. I find the github web interface a lot more
convenient that the one we have on git.overlays.gentoo.org, so I'm
rather anxious for us to start using github more.

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer
Gentoo Qt project lead, Gentoo Wiki admin

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Theo Chatzimichos]

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On Monday 31 of December 2012 16:46:53 Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 30 December 2012 00:13, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2012-12-29 at 16:42 +0800, Ben de Groot wrote:
> >> On 27 December 2012 00:39, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound"
> >> > repository
> >> > until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull and trusted
> >> > people
> >> > can review submitted branches and apply them to CVS?
> >> 
> >> This is why I started https://github.com/yngwin/proxy-maint/
> >> Feel free to send pull requests my way. I have been very busy lately
> >> with work, so I am a bit behind on my Gentoo stuff, but I should be back
> >> in full swing soon.
> > 
> > Not to sidetrack the topic farther, but isn't this best done in our
> > github/gentoo account.  It is one of the main reasons we have it, to
> > easily accept pull requests from users.  It would also make it easier
> > for more devs to participate in a group proxy-maint repo.
> 
> I started this repo as a private initiative to deal with some of my
> proxy maintainers. If other devs find it useful, I'm happy to move it
> to the Gentoo organization account on github.
> 
> Another reason I didn't do that so far, is that I was told infra is
> looking into setting up an integral solution to mirror our official
> overlays on github. It's been a while though, so it would be nice to
> hear some news on that. I find the github web interface a lot more
> convenient that the one we have on git.overlays.gentoo.org, so I'm
> rather anxious for us to start using github more.

infra is not working on such thing. Feel free to move the repo to the gentoo 
organization.

Theo

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Michael Mol]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-12-29 at 16:42 +0800, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> On 27 December 2012 00:39, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Can we short cut the whole quiz process and have some "Inbound" repository
>> > until we're full git, which people can fork/commit/pull and trusted people
>> > can review submitted branches and apply them to CVS?
>>
>> This is why I started https://github.com/yngwin/proxy-maint/
>> Feel free to send pull requests my way. I have been very busy lately
>> with work, so I am a bit behind on my Gentoo stuff, but I should be back
>> in full swing soon.
>>
>
> Not to sidetrack the topic farther, but isn't this best done in our
> github/gentoo account.  It is one of the main reasons we have it, to
> easily accept pull requests from users.  It would also make it easier
> for more devs to participate in a group proxy-maint repo.

Certainly a sidetrack: I would like to point out that Github now
supports "Organizations" as a semantic concept. I *highly* recommend
using something like that over using an 'individual' account as an
organization.

I've been using Github "Organizations" in a private context, and it's
been working extremely well.

--
:wq

Re: [gentoo-dev] Attracting developers (Re: Packages up for grabs...)

[Theo Chatzimichos]

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On Saturday 29 of December 2012 11:32:45 Michael Mol wrote:
> Certainly a sidetrack: I would like to point out that Github now
> supports "Organizations" as a semantic concept. I *highly* recommend
> using something like that over using an 'individual' account as an
> organization.
> 
> I've been using Github "Organizations" in a private context, and it's
> been working extremely well.

It is an organization, not a normal account.

Theo

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