On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 09:58:30AM -0400, Peter Hyman wrote:
> In addition, I and others have contributed ebuilds for consideration,
> and they continue to languish or are assigned to the maintainer-wanted
> alias. I have offered to produce ebuilds for review and submission. I
> was told I needed to become a developer. While I would be happy to take
> on the responsibility, I don't see why it would be necessary. The
> ebuilds are already there for you. Just search ROX in bugzilla. I don't
> need my name on it. However, I do feel strongly that if you are going to
> offer a package suite in portage, you have an obligation to keep it
> current -- ESPECIALLY when the user community is doing the work already.
> No one is asking for any special work to be done -- just that bugs are
> responded to and handled.

If bugs are not handled in a timely manner, it is because we're
shorthanded. This is also the reason new ebuilds are often assigned to
maintainer-wanted. We'd rather not add packages to portage if there is
no developer to pick up maintenance for them. Remember that we are all
investing our spare time to work on Gentoo, we're not getting paid.
We'd rather focus on removing bugs from packages already in portage than
on adding new packages.

Also for some packages it is hard to find a maintainer because it is
best if the maintainer is also an active user of the package. If a
relatively small group of people uses a package, it's much harder to
find a suitable maintainer.

If you see an area that could use an extra developer working on it and
you think you could be that developer, by all means apply for the
position.

Here are some links of interest:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/staffing-needs/index.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2

Regards,
Maurice.

-- 
Maurice van der Pot

Gentoo Linux Developer   griffon26@gentoo.org     http://www.gentoo.org
Creator of BiteMe!       griffon26@kfk4ever.com   http://www.kfk4ever.com