[gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Mart Raudsepp]

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Hello,

I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
have.

This basically means ideas for tools, scripts, or functionality in some
hypothetical centralized maintainer helper website or GUI/CLI program
that would help save time in taking care of some of the gruntwork that
gets done by maintainers right now manually or by scripts that don't get
shared and re-used and generalized as much as they could.

Then afterwards I can sort through the suggestions/ideas, try to make a
summary and arrange some of them to actually happen.

If things get done quicker, there is theoretically more available time,
which hopefully would translate into being able to bring us back to the
bleeding edge in one hand, and high quality in another.

I have intentionally left out my own ideas at start to keep everyone's
mind open to various approaches to this.


Please share your thoughts and ideas as a reply here, on my matching
blog post as comments or via private e-mail!

-- 
Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio@gentoo.org
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio

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Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Tuesday 03 March 2009 21:01:36 Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> Please share your thoughts and ideas as a reply here

there have been threads in the past about collecting all the random scripts 
that people use related to Gentoo.  you might want to scrape those as well as 
the cvs dir that was set up to house them ...
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Peter Alfredsen]

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:01:36 +0200
Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
> community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
> quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
> have.

Something like what Debian does where a central service monitors
upstream ftp and notifies you when a bump is available.

Per-package eclasses - eblits standardized.

Crazy idea: Not-quite-eclasses. Some way to share small bits of code
between packages, though the code may not be eclass-worthy. We all know
the use-cases:
[[ -f ChangeLog ]] && \
 { dodoc ChangeLog || die "ChangeLog exists but cannot be dodoc'ed" ; }

And bits of code of that ilk.

Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Olivier Crête]

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On Wed, 2009-03-04 at 03:26 +0100, Peter Alfredsen wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:01:36 +0200
> Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
> > community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
> > quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
> > have.
> 
> Something like what Debian does where a central service monitors
> upstream ftp and notifies you when a bump is available.
> 
> Per-package eclasses - eblits standardized.
> 
> Crazy idea: Not-quite-eclasses. Some way to share small bits of code
> between packages, though the code may not be eclass-worthy. We all know
> the use-cases:
> [[ -f ChangeLog ]] && \
>  { dodoc ChangeLog || die "ChangeLog exists but cannot be dodoc'ed" ; }
> 
> And bits of code of that ilk.

Maybe we could use the dev wiki for that kind of stuff?

Having a wiki.gentoo.org would be even better...

-- 
Olivier Crête
tester@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer

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Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Josh Saddler]

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Olivier Crête wrote:
> Maybe we could use the dev wiki for that kind of stuff?
> 
> Having a wiki.gentoo.org would be even better...

There is, but it's uber-sekrit.

Or so I was told some years ago. It may or may not (still) exist.



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Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 03:26 Wed 04 Mar     , Peter Alfredsen wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:01:36 +0200
> Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
> > community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
> > quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
> > have.
> 
> Something like what Debian does where a central service monitors
> upstream ftp and notifies you when a bump is available.

pythonhead wrote meatoo a while back, it can do this kind of thing. It 
could probably use a bit of love.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 21:24 Tue 03 Mar     , Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 March 2009 21:01:36 Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> > Please share your thoughts and ideas as a reply here
> 
> there have been threads in the past about collecting all the random scripts 
> that people use related to Gentoo.  you might want to scrape those as well as 
> the cvs dir that was set up to house them ...

I've been talking about making a dev-tools git overlay for a while. 
Anyone could get access, and you just have an ebuild that installs your 
little script(s) in files/. Anyone want to make it happen?

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com

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[gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 04:01:36AM +0200, Mart Raudsepp wrote:

> I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
> community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
> quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
> have.

Give a git access to the developpers beside the current CVS ?

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht

Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Petteri Räty]

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Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
> community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
> quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
> have.
> 

This RSS feed should be turned into a GLEP about a automatic stable
request bug filer. Will get to it eventually but if someone wants to get
to it before I do then feel free.

http://gentoo.petteriraty.eu/stable.rss

Regards,
Petteri


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[gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Ryan Hill]

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On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:01:36 +0200
Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I'm collecting ideas from the wider development and contributing
> community on how to help maintainers and contributors get work done
> quicker, or rephrased - how to get more done in the limited time we
> have.
> 
> This basically means ideas for tools, scripts, or functionality in
> some hypothetical centralized maintainer helper website or GUI/CLI
> program that would help save time in taking care of some of the
> gruntwork that gets done by maintainers right now manually or by
> scripts that don't get shared and re-used and generalized as much as
> they could.
> 
> Then afterwards I can sort through the suggestions/ideas, try to make
> a summary and arrange some of them to actually happen.

One tool I used a lot before metadata.xml USE flags sprung up
everywhere was metagen (in the tree under apps-portage), written by
pythonhead.  For anyone who hasn't used it, it's a commandline util
written in python (surprise!) for generating metadata.xml.  You can
give it a herd, maintainer name/email, maintainer description, package
description, etc., and it will hock out a xml loogie for you.  I've
been meaning to update it for USE flags (and whatever else we're
stuffing into xml these days) as a learn-python project, but like all
my learn-* projects it's never gotten anywhere.  Maybe someone with the
requisite skills and boredom level might be interested in poking at it.


-- 
gcc-porting,                                      by design, by neglect
treecleaner,                              for a fact or just for effect
wxwidgets @ gentoo     EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662

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[gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Duncan]

Ryan Hill <dirtyepic@gentoo.org> posted
20090306194452.6b5bf4e5@halo.dirtyepic.sk.ca, excerpted below, on  Fri, 06
Mar 2009 19:44:52 -0600:

> You can give [metagen] a herd, maintainer name/email, maintainer
> description, package description, etc., and it will hock out a xml
> loogie for you.

LOL.  Never seen it described quite /that/ way before, but it's... 
interesting! =:^)

> I've been meaning to update it [...] as a learn-python project,
> but like all my learn-* projects it's never gotten anywhere.

You to, eh?  (For me, the dev-manual, etc, and perhaps ultimately,
Gentoo-dev, is on that list, too.)  Well, one thing's for sure, a long 
list /does/ tend to be a decently effective boredom repellent...

What's frustrating is that as one gets older (42 here), it's no longer 
possible to work all day and study/play all nite for 36 hours at a 
stretch, and be effective at both, as it used to be.  But the internal 
scheduler doesn't seem to understand that so keeps adding stuff to that 
todo list as if it were!

So all you youngun's out there, pick it up while you can!  Oh, and 
[waving cane] GET OFF MY LAWN!!

-- 
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: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Caleb Cushing]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht
<nicolas.s-dev@laposte.net> wrote:
> Give a git access to the developpers beside the current CVS ?

or replace cvs with git... oh and you can replace rsync too... because
git is faster there as well.
-- 
Caleb Cushing

http://xenoterracide.blogspot.com

[gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 02:22:00AM -0500, Caleb Cushing wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht
> <nicolas.s-dev@laposte.net> wrote:
> > Give a git access to the developpers beside the current CVS ?
> 
> or replace cvs with git... oh and you can replace rsync too... because
> git is faster there as well.

Provide a git only access today is not serious. Some developpers may
not want to learn/switch to git. It could be a long term goal, however.

I'm not thinking of internal tools efficiency. It's all about workflow.

Also, rsync just do what it has to do the right way. Git does not fit to
that kind of job.

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Alec Warner]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Caleb Cushing <xenoterracide@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Nicolas Sebrecht
> <nicolas.s-dev@laposte.net> wrote:
>> Give a git access to the developpers beside the current CVS ?
>
> or replace cvs with git... oh and you can replace rsync too... because
> git is faster there as well.

People are working on the whole 'replace cvs with git' thing on the
gentoo-scm list.

> --
> Caleb Cushing
>
> http://xenoterracide.blogspot.com
>
>

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Caleb Cushing]

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> People are working on the whole 'replace cvs with git' thing on the
> gentoo-scm list.

I'm supposedly on that list and I haven't gotten a message all week?
is it low traffic? or do I have a subscription/other problem.

-- 
Caleb Cushing

http://xenoterracide.blogspot.com

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Robin H. Johnson]

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On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 07:57:02PM -0500, Caleb Cushing wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > People are working on the whole 'replace cvs with git' thing on the
> > gentoo-scm list.
> I'm supposedly on that list and I haven't gotten a message all week?
> is it low traffic? or do I have a subscription/other problem.
It's fairly low traffic.

The last discussion was just under 2 weeks ago, was about how Manifests
would need to be changed to cut down on merge conflicts. The last
proposal on that was to consider a form of slim Manifest for developers
only (it would still be a full form going to rsync), where objects in
git were not explicitly tracked in the Manifest, but rather but signed
commits (not tags), as their checksums were tracked by the DVCS anyway.

Additionally, there is this pending item on a Git resource usage bug
that hurts badly during the initial clone:
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-scm/msg_df7c98ec7d2e313856bec31769df407f.xml

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85

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[gentoo-dev] Re: How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

Hi,

(Mail sent to gentoo-dev & gentoo-scm, please Fu2 gentoo-scm only)

On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 06:29:08PM -0800, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 07:57:02PM -0500, Caleb Cushing wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:

> > > People are working on the whole 'replace cvs with git' thing on the
> > > gentoo-scm list.
> > I'm supposedly on that list and I haven't gotten a message all week?
> > is it low traffic? or do I have a subscription/other problem.
> It's fairly low traffic.
> 
> The last discussion was just under 2 weeks ago, was about how Manifests
> would need to be changed to cut down on merge conflicts. The last
> proposal on that was to consider a form of slim Manifest for developers
> only (it would still be a full form going to rsync), where objects in
> git were not explicitly tracked in the Manifest, but rather but signed
> commits (not tags), as their checksums were tracked by the DVCS anyway.
> 
> Additionally, there is this pending item on a Git resource usage bug
> that hurts badly during the initial clone:
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-scm/msg_df7c98ec7d2e313856bec31769df407f.xml

Following this discussion on the dev list, it appears that some of us
missed the 'replace cvs with git' project going on here (on gentoo-scm).

As it's very time consuming to find the relevant previous threads. So,
could someone give us more information of the state of the project ?
(general expected workflow, technical issues, etc) A brief abstract
would be very much appreciated.

I've read the above link. Now, I know about the Manifest issue.

Also, did you had information on how git hosted overlays work ?

Thanks,

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht

Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Thilo Bangert]

one thing that could perhaps speed up gentoo is specifying at what point 
or what steps are required before it is ok to "step on others toes".

we have the QAcanfix keyword, for bugs where QA "threatens" to just fix 
the bug if the maintainer doesn't react timely... but it appears to be the 
tree could generally move faster, if there was an agreement as to when 
somebody is allowed to fix another maintainers stuff.

if we had a formal process in place, one could always execute on that and 
fix the issue oneself, instead of having the cheap excuse of "well, 
<slowguy> hasnt fixed bug xxx yet, so i cant move".

this process should ideally be very lean and short - as to not discourage 
these type of changes.

kind regards
Thilo

Re: [gentoo-dev] How to speed up maintenance and other Gentoo work?

[Grant Goodyear]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Thilo Bangert <bangert@gentoo.org> wrote:
> one thing that could perhaps speed up gentoo is specifying at what point
> or what steps are required before it is ok to "step on others toes".
>
> we have the QAcanfix keyword, for bugs where QA "threatens" to just fix
> the bug if the maintainer doesn't react timely... but it appears to be the
> tree could generally move faster, if there was an agreement as to when
> somebody is allowed to fix another maintainers stuff.
>
> if we had a formal process in place, one could always execute on that and
> fix the issue oneself, instead of having the cheap excuse of "well,
> <slowguy> hasnt fixed bug xxx yet, so i cant move".
>
> this process should ideally be very lean and short - as to not discourage
> these type of changes.

Heh.

I always liked the old policy: Don't break stuff.  If you're sure you
know what you're doing, and you're not going to break stuff, then do
what needs to be done.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear		
web: http://www.grantgoodyear.org	
e-mail: grant@grantgoodyear.org