Re: [gentoo-dev] Becoming a Gentoo developer?

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 17 Apr 2015 14:50:00 +0200 hasufell wrote:
> >> If you have followed the recent discussions about gentoos organizational
> >> structure, review workflow and overlay situation you would know that
> >> there is a pretty simple solution for this problem.
> > 
> > I have followed them and I have seen no solution usable in real
> > world.
> >  
> 
> The solution is that for example the ruby project assigns a few
> reviewers (e.g. project lead) and if someone wants to bump ruby
> packages, he submits a pull request and the assignee is going to be the
> ruby project. What's the problem?

The problem is double effort: previously one developer effort was
needed, now effort is doubled at least: reviewers must dig into
details how submitted code works, test it and only then commit. Now
remember that reviewers are also developers. This means that pull
requests will hang for weeks, months, forever due to a lack of time.
On top of all this thinks about maintainer-needed packages or
packages that can't be categorised into some single project, e.g.
*-misc categories.

> Do you think the usb-subsystem maintainer of the kernel is going to
> fiddle with the cryptography subsystem all by himself? That's not the
> case. And that's why the linux kernel workflow works: competence,
> subsystems and trust.

As I pointed above comparision of Gentoo with Linux kernel is
invalid. We have different resources. Another argument that
connectivity between subsystems is much higher in the Linux kernel.

> All that is done in real world. And there are tons of tools to automated
> such a workflow easily without dumping everything to a single mailing list.

Reviews cannot be automated. A human being is still needed to read,
understand and test proposed code. All tools like pull requests and
so automate only a small bit of real work.
 
> Global reviews will only happen when stuff is actually of global
> importance, like non-trivial eclass changes or far-reaching technical
> decisions.

We already have that with gentoo-dev mail list. And I'm happy with
current solution. If you can't handle patchset from e-mails, learn
houw to use tools, e.g. quilt.

> So please do some research first before doing broad statements about
> what kind of workflow is possible. 
 
I already done such research and my conclusion is that it can't be
fundamentally changed. Only small improvements here and there are
possible.

> Other distros successfully use such workflows.

Other distros are binary based. They don't have USE flags, they
don't have plenty of different compilers and environments. All they
do is package building with predefined set of options in a fixed
environment for each arch. Gentoo is much more complex than that.
You can compare only apples to apples, not apples to plane.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

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