Re: Proxy maintainers in metadata.xml (was Re: [gentoo-dev] introduce a soft-limit policy for changing other developers ebuilds)

[Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se>]

Markos Chandras wrote:
> This policy is for the bug-wranglers project, which someone must
> read before he attempts to do any bug-wrangling.
> I see no reason to move this to devmanual.

The reason is that I as a developer (whenever I become one) want to
be able to fix stuff right now that is broken on my system and
publish those fixes somewhere.

I believe and hope that working with bugs will see new approaches
when the warm git blanket is swept around the portage repo.

In the last 15 hours I've dealt with several trivial bugs that I've
found fixes for in bugzilla but which were not committed anywhere.

I've committed them to my overlay and that's fine for me, but if I
were a developer I would find it super lame to have to stop there and
wait for $otherguy to take time to look at "his" bugs.

The bugs are equally much mine, because they bite me.

I'm not saying I expect to change everyone's ebuilds, but I'm saying
that I think the bug tracker has way more emphasis today than I would
like it to. I think most of that is because it simply couldn't have
worked any other way. In the future it might, and I think that's
good.

I would expect to fix the bugs, and then email patches to whoever is
the maintainer. It would be worthwhile to have automatic extraction
of who needs to get that email based on what files were touched. No
bug needed, if maintainers get perfect patches in email they can
review them quickly and simply push them into the tree.

End result: Everyone has mandate to fix bugs and it becomes so easy
for maintainers to apply fixes that they can do it immediately when
anyone sends a perfect patch. The dream scenario would be a gerrit
instance in front of the repo. (Yes infra, that means Java. Sorry,
but that tool is best in class IMO.)


Finally my thanks to everyone who helps make Gentoo better every day!


//Peter