Re: [gentoo-dev] Soliciting input for a non-maintainer update (NMU) GLEP

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 6:20 AM, Michael Weber <xmw@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Bottom line: I think we need more of a culture of mutual trust than a
> ton of metadata.
>

I have to agree with this.  The culture should be that we're doing
this work FOR GENTOO.  Sure, we're getting benefits out of it as well
so it should be a win/win, but we're all in this together.

I do think there is some metadata that would be useful.  Rather than
capturing a "keep out" flag, perhaps it would make more sense to
capture more "factual" information, like a comment for humans to read,
and maybe a status for scripts.  This shouldn't be about who is and
isn't allowed to touch things, but rather WHY somebody might think
twice about touching things.

For example, many system packages should get the white glove treatment
because they're, well, system packages.  I'd like to think that even
the greenest of recruits would appreciate that glibc isn't the best
package in the world to experiment on, but a script might not catch
that.

Useful and informative comments to humans might be useful as well.
For example, I might mark my package as "do-not-stabilize" for the
scripts and add a comment "game client interfaces with external game
server that changes API without warning and requires instant updates."

Anybody running scripts on the tree should be careful from the start -
perhaps we should even require pre-announcement on -dev.  Manual
changes are less of a risk, especially if there is warning.

All that said, I'm not opposed to there being some kind of flag.
However, I think we need to set the expectation that this is about
helping us all to collaborate better, and not about putting up
razorwire.

Rich