On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:07:37 +0000 Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org> wrote:
| One of the bigger problems is that we have a huge user community who
| are keen on contributing, but we have such a high barrier for entry
| to the developer community. Quite rightly so - we're dealing with a
| live tree, so we can't give out commit access on the street.

A relatively easy way of lowering that barrier would be to provide
good, up to date, example-oriented ebuild writing documentation.
There's too much stuff that people need to know to write ebuilds that's
not written down anywhere -- this not only makes it harder for users to
write good ebuilds, but also leads to some of them being dissuaded when
they're told that the only way to know what's policy is by having paid
attention on the mailing lists for the past five years.