[gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Hell no, but ...

We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.

For example:
- hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just
take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the
hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any
longer. 

- Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
documentation wiki, but ... 

- Infra: One might get the idea our Infra team is just Robin (yeah, sure
there are more people, but ....) ... things are happening slowly (no
offend - I fully understand that those few can't dedicate more of their
spare time to infra work!), take overlays.g.o migration, Bugzie-3
migration and so on as an example.

- Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were
missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly
those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their
business servers from.

- Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
asleep.

- Speaking of our website, PR ... guess there's nothing more to add. 

So - what to do now? To be honest - I have no real clue. But a first
step might be to collect your opinions on where we do lack manpower and
ideas on how to solve this problems. A Wiki might be fitting well for
that task *cough*. A next step might be to discuss every identified
problem and discuss our options and ideas how to improve the situation. 

- Tobias

-- 
Praxisbuch Nagios
http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

["Paweł Hajdan, Jr."]

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On 4/3/10 11:16 AM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Hell no, but ...
> 
> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
> 
> For example:
> - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
> overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
> hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.

I recently sent an e-mail to gentoo-dev,
<http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_2eb703ee97afc64a29e5d148457ac8d5.xml>

It seems that some work is being done, but there are people who
volunteered to help, like me. What needs to be done with hardened-sources?

Just a note: I'm using it on my servers, so I'm really interested in
them being maintained, and I'm also able to test.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 11:26 +0200 schrieb "Paweł Hajdan, Jr.":
> > For example:
> > - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
> > overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
> > hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
> 
> I recently sent an e-mail to gentoo-dev,
> <http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_2eb703ee97afc64a29e5d148457ac8d5.xml>

Yeah, seen that.

> It seems that some work is being done, but there are people who
> volunteered to help, like me. What needs to be done with hardened-sources?
> 
> Just a note: I'm using it on my servers, so I'm really interested in
> them being maintained, and I'm also able to test.

See - what we've been doing with people like you who are willing to
contribute was something like "Hey, nice to see you. Get in touch with
the correct people, please" - and i'm pretty sure there are many options
on how to improve our handling of people like you, who are willing to
contribute some amount of time to the Gentoo Project.

- Tobias

-- 
Praxisbuch Nagios
http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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hardened-sources development (was: Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?)

[Thomas Sachau]

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Am 03.04.2010 11:26, schrieb "Paweł Hajdan, Jr.":
> On 4/3/10 11:16 AM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>> Hell no, but ...
>>
>> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
>> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
>> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
>>
>> For example:
>> - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
>> overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
>> hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
> 
> I recently sent an e-mail to gentoo-dev,
> <http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_2eb703ee97afc64a29e5d148457ac8d5.xml>
> 
> It seems that some work is being done, but there are people who
> volunteered to help, like me. What needs to be done with hardened-sources?
> 
> Just a note: I'm using it on my servers, so I'm really interested in
> them being maintained, and I'm also able to test.
> 

Most development of hardened-sources was done in hardened-development overlay. There are currently
recent versions of hardened-sources, but they have some regressions, which should be fixed, before
they are added to the main tree. If you want to help out with this package, i suggest you join
#gentoo-hardened on freenode, since that is the place, where most of the conversation is done.
Additionally it might have been better to send this mail at least in CC to gentoo-hardened ML, since
most interested and active people are only subscribed there.

-- 
Thomas Sachau

Gentoo Linux Developer


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Brian Harring]

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On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 11:16:32AM +0200, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Hell no, but ...

Then avoid feeding the distrowatch trolls w/ sensational 
subjects please ;)


> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.

Got any metrics offhand?  The reason I ask is that I can't think of a 
time when 'understaffed' wasn't an applicable term.

Sidenote, if we *aren't* tracking the basics, it might be worthwhile.  
Shouldn't be too hard to grab the history of herds.xml for example and 
extract the relevant data.

One thing to note... crappy support for something can draw people out 
to contribute.  Hence asking about metrics- I wouldn't be surprised if 
the headcount for misc. projects is a cyclic rise/fall.

At the very least I'd be curious about the pre and post git metrics, 
once that conversion is finished up.


> - Infra: One might get the idea our Infra team is just Robin (yeah, sure
> there are more people, but ....) ... things are happening slowly (no
> offend - I fully understand that those few can't dedicate more of their
> spare time to infra work!), take overlays.g.o migration, Bugzie-3
> migration and so on as an example.

Relaying from IRC, overlays.g.o migration bits seem to be done...


> - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
> someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
> asleep.

A status update on this one would be useful, even if it's just "got no 
time, here's what is remaining" so someone could jump in and help 
where possible.

Personally I'd suggest trying to extract status updates from folk- 
it's more useful anyways to know what's needed to get various projects 
done.

~harring

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 02:37 -0700 schrieb Brian Harring:
> On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 11:16:32AM +0200, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> > Hell no, but ...
> 
> Then avoid feeding the distrowatch trolls w/ sensational 
> subjects please ;)

oh, well ;)

> > We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> > Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> > users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
> 
> Got any metrics offhand?  The reason I ask is that I can't think of a 
> time when 'understaffed' wasn't an applicable term.

Metrics are a problem and i'm pretty sure you won't get any somewhat
"correct" metrics as we have lots of herds which do have some developers
listed as herd members, who are mia for quite some time. Still when
considering herd members who did a commit to a package belonging to
given herd in the past say 4 weeks as active you won't get useful
metrics.

> Sidenote, if we *aren't* tracking the basics, it might be worthwhile.  
> Shouldn't be too hard to grab the history of herds.xml for example and 
> extract the relevant data.
> 
> One thing to note... crappy support for something can draw people out 
> to contribute.  Hence asking about metrics- I wouldn't be surprised if 
> the headcount for misc. projects is a cyclic rise/fall.
> 
> At the very least I'd be curious about the pre and post git metrics, 
> once that conversion is finished up.
> 
> 
> > - Infra: One might get the idea our Infra team is just Robin (yeah, sure
> > there are more people, but ....) ... things are happening slowly (no
> > offend - I fully understand that those few can't dedicate more of their
> > spare time to infra work!), take overlays.g.o migration, Bugzie-3
> > migration and so on as an example.
> 
> Relaying from IRC, overlays.g.o migration bits seem to be done...

Yeah, probably i had something wrong in mind. Nevermind. 

Tbh, my intention wasn't to discuss the _examples_ i listed, but to hear
all your opinions and ideas on where we do have problems and how to
solve them.

> > - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
> > someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
> > asleep.
> 
> A status update on this one would be useful, even if it's just "got no 
> time, here's what is remaining" so someone could jump in and help 
> where possible.
> 
> Personally I'd suggest trying to extract status updates from folk- 
> it's more useful anyways to know what's needed to get various projects 
> done.

Yeah, status updates++ ... at least active projects/herds (like what
Robin said about Infra) would be considered more active then :)

- Tobias

-- 
Praxisbuch Nagios
http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Petteri Räty]

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On 04/03/2010 12:16 PM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:

> 
> - Infra: One might get the idea our Infra team is just Robin (yeah, sure
> there are more people, but ....) ... things are happening slowly (no
> offend - I fully understand that those few can't dedicate more of their
> spare time to infra work!), take overlays.g.o migration, Bugzie-3
> migration and so on as an example.
>

My perception from the outside is also that it's sometimes hard to offer
help. So if we now that we are busy then let's try to embrace others
doing the work.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Jacob Godserv]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 05:38, Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@gentoo.org> wrote:
> My perception from the outside is also that it's sometimes hard to offer
> help. So if we now that we are busy then let's try to embrace others
> doing the work.

This is also what I have observed. I think Gentoo needs appear to be
much more focused on how to let people contribute, rather than how to
filter/monitor contributions. There's too much discussion about how
something is bad and why it shouldn't happen in the documentation and
mailing list, and too little about what can be done to make sure the
contribution, idea, or user(s) get included.

One specific example I can give is the developer status itself. Gentoo
developers are responsible for everything, including maintenance. This
is not a bad thing, if it's part of a greater developer ecosystem. All
successful projects I've observed survive on half of the work, at
least, being done by volunteers, and the developers are there to
simply review the work before it is applied.

As far as I can tell, creating an inviting atmosphere, in which the
developers listen and react to the community, is essential to the
continued survival of Gentoo.

Yea, this one of those long-term things that sounds awesome in theory
but is hard to do right. However, I think the sooner ideas like these
are discussed and possibly implemented, the sooner we don't have
threads like these in the mailing list. I am encouraged that Gentoo
developers are considering how to regroup themselves.

-- 
    Jacob

    "For then there will be great distress, unequaled
    from the beginning of the world until now — and never
    to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut
    short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the
    elect those days will be shortened."

    Are you ready?

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 11:16:32AM +0200, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> - Infra: One might get the idea our Infra team is just Robin (yeah, sure
> there are more people, but ....) ... things are happening slowly (no
> offend - I fully understand that those few can't dedicate more of their
> spare time to infra work!), take overlays.g.o migration, Bugzie-3
> migration and so on as an example.
- Presently in the infra team and active on a day-to-day basis:
darkside
ford_prefect
halcy0n
idl0r
robbat2
- In the infra team and active several times/month:
fox2mike
kingtaco
ramereth
solar
armin76

Problems in infra:
- lack of communication and perceived transparency
	- We'd like to open read-only access to our Nagios soon...
- lack of perceived progress
	- The perceived big ticket items appear to move very slowly, because
	  they are much lower priority than day-to-day running of infra.

I do have an announcement to make in the next day or 3 about some infra
stuff that's going on, because it's going to affect every developer.

Question for you there, you said 'overlays.g.o migration'. What
migration? It moved to the "new" hardware more than a year ago.

> - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
> someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
> asleep.
The guy that was doing the redesign changes vanished for a long time,
he's been around again lately however.

> So - what to do now? To be honest - I have no real clue. But a first
> step might be to collect your opinions on where we do lack manpower and
> ideas on how to solve this problems. A Wiki might be fitting well for
> that task *cough*. A next step might be to discuss every identified
> problem and discuss our options and ideas how to improve the situation. 
Discussion on wiki has been going on for a while, I'll come, in a couple
of months probably, but I still haven't heard anything of my call for
people that were willing to do the work of editors and spam removal.

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

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 09:40:12AM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > So - what to do now? To be honest - I have no real clue. But a first
> > step might be to collect your opinions on where we do lack manpower and
> > ideas on how to solve this problems. A Wiki might be fitting well for
> > that task *cough*. A next step might be to discuss every identified
> > problem and discuss our options and ideas how to improve the situation. 
> Discussion on wiki has been going on for a while, I'll come, in a couple
> of months probably, but I still haven't heard anything of my call for
> people that were willing to do the work of editors and spam removal.
"It'll come". That typo sucked.

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

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Patrick Lauer]

On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Hell no, but ...
> 
> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.

So what are _you_ doing to make it better?

> For example:
> - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
> overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
> hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
> Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just
> take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the
> hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any
> longer. 
With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things,
especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ...


> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
> documentation wiki, but ... 
yeah, as long as no one just creates a wiki there won't be one. People
are waiting on other people, who are waiting for Godot. Just do it.

I remember the long and whiny road to get a blog aggregator - what
killed the waiting deadlock was simply karltk setting up one (unofficial
etc.etc.) and suddenly people saw that it was good.

> - Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were
> missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly
> those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their
> business servers from.
And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd
people go all territorial and are like "omg u touched my package".
Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as
far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum
and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not
cooperating well ...

> So - what to do now? 
For me it's simple. I try to
- dedicate time to fixing things. Takes lots of time, can be demotivating
- try to motivate and recruit new users - hard to motivate them, and
with our current recruiting setup it's hard to keep them motivated
- not get demotivated by the "OMG it's all bad" attitude some people radiate

And don't just start discussing how to discuss things. That's not going
to work. You'll end up with a pretty specific plan how to discuss the
whole thing, then get bored and not discuss it at all.

Just start fixing things. Set yourself some personal goals (do on
average one commit a day? fix one bug a day?) and try to reach them. If
you do, set yourself some new goals.

I have found some pretty amazing proxy-maintainers in the last weeks,
there's quite a lot of progress happening. There's still lots of
potential, but most people only start interacting with us once we have
started to show some activity.

Right now we might be in a not-that-excellent position, but it won't
just go away. It needs all of us to _do_ something.

wkr,

Patrick

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 11:46 +0200 schrieb Patrick Lauer:
> > We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
> > Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
> > users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
> 
> So what are _you_ doing to make it better?

I started to maintain those "unmaintained" packages which are important
to me myself and ended up in the net-mail/netmon herds for example.
Postfix, Cyrus-Imap, Bind, Nagios and several others are packages i put
my hands on - just because noone else did and those were and still are
essential to me.

> > - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
> > overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
> > hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
> > Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just
> > take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the
> > hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported any
> > longer. 
> With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things,
> especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ...

Good to see there's something happening in hardened - but still, the
user outside of Gentoo still only is seeing: "Oh, no hardened-sources
update for nearly a year."

> > - Understaffed herds: For example net-mail, netmon and others - were
> > missing lots of developers and their support in lots of areas. Sadly
> > those areas are mostly those ones, one might need packages for their
> > business servers from.
> And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd
> people go all territorial and are like "omg u touched my package".
> Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as
> far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum
> and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not
> cooperating well ...

I for one can't say I had any territorial problems when touching
packages belonging to other devs or herds - it's just a problem if you
screw up.

- Tobias

-- 
Praxisbuch Nagios
http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Richard Freeman]

On 04/03/2010 06:19 AM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>> And still, when someone tries to fix things in such an understaffed herd
>> people go all territorial and are like "omg u touched my package".
>> Right now I'm quite confused what our project strategy seems to be, as
>> far as I can tell there's one group aiming for an aesthetical optimum
>> and the other group just wants to get things fixed. And they are not
>> cooperating well ...
>
> I for one can't say I had any territorial problems when touching
> packages belonging to other devs or herds - it's just a problem if you
> screw up.
>

Agreed - if you ping the herd in advance, and get an OK (or at least no 
reply for a few days), and then you make some simple fixes to their 
packages, it is very unlikely that you're going to have any complaints.

If you send the the proposed patch in advance and let them review it, 
and you get no complaints, you're even more clearly in the right.

If you don't notify them at all, or you notify them and do a cvs commit 
3 minutes later, or if you completely redesign their ebuilds in addition 
to fixing a 1-line problem, then you're going to get complaints.

Nobody minds help.  People do mind when somebody drops by to help them 
for 5 minutes and they're stuck with the aftermath.  We don't "own" our 
packages, but existing maintainers have at least shown a long-term 
commitment to them (however strong) and that should at least be respected.

On other topics in this thread:

I agree wholeheartedly that whenever possible "just do it" is a good 
approach - especially when you're talking about documentation and 
external websites/etc.  Modifications to things that already exist are 
less amenable to "just do it."

I really think that the Gentoo recruitment process needs improvement. 
Right now it seems like a LOT of effort is required both to become a 
Gentoo dev and to help somebody become a Gentoo dev.  That means we have 
great people, but not many of them.

I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to 
answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess 
maturity.  I think that maturity is far more important than technical 
skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations 
and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them.  Instead of 
playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a 
better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more 
clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other 
approaches like references and interviews.  A new recruit might be given 
the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60 
minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to 
submit references, who will be contacted.  When we hire people at work 
we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a 
feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen 
resumes and references to determine experience.  I'm sure any of the 
professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps 
somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere.

So, now instead of a recruiter having to spend hours helping somebody 
through quizzes without giving them answers, instead they just send them 
a list of interviewers, and collate the results.  Any interviewer will 
just need to spend 30 minutes on an interview and 10 minutes on a 
writeup.  Plus, the whole process will make Gentoo a bit more human.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Petteri Räty]

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On 04/03/2010 02:33 PM, Richard Freeman wrote:

> 
> I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to
> answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess
> maturity.  I think that maturity is far more important than technical
> skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations
> and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them.  Instead of
> playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a
> better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more
> clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other
> approaches like references and interviews.  A new recruit might be given
> the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60
> minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to
> submit references, who will be contacted.  When we hire people at work
> we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a
> feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen
> resumes and references to determine experience.  I'm sure any of the
> professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps
> somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere.
> 

The sessions also teach them a lot. I regularly get feedback that people
learned a lot during the sessions. Reading a lot of technical
documentation doesn't motivate many but the reviews do.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to
> answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess
> maturity.  I think that maturity is far more important than technical skill
> in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations and
> exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them.  Instead of playing 20
> questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a better approach
> would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more clearly put their
> answers in the documentation), and then use other approaches like references
> and interviews.  A new recruit might be given the names of 5 devs that they
> will need to interview with for 30-60 minutes by phone or IRC (preference on
> phone), and they will need to submit references, who will be contacted.
>  When we hire people at work we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use
> an interview to get a feel for what they're like and how they handle
> situations, and we screen resumes and references to determine experience.
>  I'm sure any of the professional linux distros would work in the same way,
> but perhaps somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere.

All ideas regarding improving recruitment are welcome, thanks. However
if, during your review, you were not given the impression that your
maturity and other social skills were being assessed then you were
being blissfully naive. :o) I use tricks like pretending I don't
understand that crystal-clear thing you're explaining to gauge your
patience and politeness, I drift off to real-life topics to find out
who the recruit really is, and lots of others like background searches
(also outside of gentoo) and talks with the mentor.

On the other hand, in your particular case, I clearly remember the
assessment was easy and thus I didn't insist too much. Which is what
probably made it more difficult for you to notice.

Denis.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Richard Freeman]

On 04/04/2010 02:09 PM, Denis Dupeyron wrote:
>
> All ideas regarding improving recruitment are welcome, thanks. However
> if, during your review, you were not given the impression that your
> maturity and other social skills were being assessed then you were
> being blissfully naive.  :o)

That actually wasn't what I was trying to convey (guess I need to work 
on those communications skills :) ).  I did recognize that you were 
looking to assess this, and that you felt that this was of critical 
importance.

What I was getting at is trying to identify what aspects of the whole 
recruitment process added the most value and which added the least, and 
adjusting accordingly.  I think that assessing attitude and maturity, 
and providing the tools and education needed are the most critical 
aspects of recruitment.

That's why I'm all for changing the approach to quizzes - from my 
experience it wasn't the quizzes themselves that really added the most 
value for me.  The interaction that they triggered and getting me to 
consider some of the more critical issues that come up in ebuild 
maintenance added far more value than getting every detail of the 
answers 100% correct.

The quizzes are just a tool - not the ultimate validators of ability. 
Let's use every tool at our disposal in the best way possible.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> What I was getting at is trying to identify what aspects of the whole
> recruitment process added the most value and which added the least, and
> adjusting accordingly.  I think that assessing attitude and maturity, and
> providing the tools and education needed are the most critical aspects of
> recruitment.

Agreed. Although the education part should come from the mentor.
Recruiters are only supposed to fill in the gaps because there's only
so much they can do. Nowadays most mentors only really care about
making sure their mentee gets the quiz answers right. That's a big
mistake. I've been mentoring somebody to help me with sci-electronics
for months now (hi Rafael!), and the quizzes are less than 5% of what
we spend time on. So what is it then? English and how to communicate
was the big thing at first but he's doing much better now, then
working on a lot of ebuilds in and outside of bugzilla, but also how
to efficiently deal with people, why things happen in a volunteer
project and most importantly why they don't, how to not get
discouraged by many little annoying things, etc... That's the kind of
things a mentor and thus every gentoo developer should invest time in
because it pays back big time.

I've been toying with a project about training mentors but can't find
the time to set it up. The idea was to have interactive sessions on
irc with a few interested devs.

> That's why I'm all for changing the approach to quizzes - from my experience
> it wasn't the quizzes themselves that really added the most value for me.
>  The interaction that they triggered and getting me to consider some of the
> more critical issues that come up in ebuild maintenance added far more value
> than getting every detail of the answers 100% correct.

I do make sure that answers are 100% correct since I consider that
part of the necessary paperwork to be recruited. However during the
review I use the quizzes mostly as a way to engage conversation on a
lot of topics, not only technical. That's the reason a review with me
lasts anywhere from 5 to 12 hours.

So in a sense what you're thinking of is already happening.

Denis.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Zeerak Mustafa Waseem]

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esOn Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 07:33:53AM -0400, Richard Freeman wrote:
> On 04/03/2010 06:19 AM, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>
> I really think that the Gentoo recruitment process needs improvement. 
> Right now it seems like a LOT of effort is required both to become a 
> Gentoo dev and to help somebody become a Gentoo dev.  That means we have 
> great people, but not many of them.
> 
> I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to 
> answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to assess 
> maturity.  I think that maturity is far more important than technical 
> skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own limitations 
> and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them.  Instead of 
> playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits, maybe a 
> better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically (or more 
> clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use other 
> approaches like references and interviews.  A new recruit might be given 
> the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for 30-60 
> minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need to 
> submit references, who will be contacted.  When we hire people at work 
> we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to get a 
> feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we screen 
> resumes and references to determine experience.  I'm sure any of the 
> professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps 
> somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere.
> 

I'm not exactly sure how you'd want the references to work, I mean, as in prior jobs/projects worked on?
I know that I'd like to help out with development, but as it stands I don't think I have the necessary skills (various programming language etc), so that is something I'm working on. 
As a consequence I naturally don't have any references (and might not by the time I feel ready) but that wouldn't necessarily mean that I'm not qualified to be working as a dev. Also one could imagine that a number of other people without references, but the necessary qualifications might think "To hell with this, I'll just put my effots somewhere else".

Another thing, you write that phone is preferred but I know that I act relaxed in text with new people and as myself. Whereas on the phone I hold back a bit, and don't really act myself. So perhaps the preference should be the manner in which the one being interviewed is more comfortable with and will act more naturally.

Anyway these are just my 2 cents.

-- 
Zeerak Waseem

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Duncan]

Zeerak Mustafa Waseem posted on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 22:19:06 +0200 as
excerpted:

> esOn Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 07:33:53AM -0400, Richard Freeman wrote:

>> I really think that the Gentoo recruitment process needs improvement.
>> Right now it seems like a LOT of effort is required both to become a
>> Gentoo dev and to help somebody become a Gentoo dev.  That means we
>> have great people, but not many of them.

I like that last sentence summation.  It's perhaps optimistic, but does 
bring into sharp focus both a positive and a negative of the current 
process.

>> I think the problem is that our recruitment process uses the ability to
>> answer complex technical and organizational questions as a way to
>> assess maturity.  I think that maturity is far more important than
>> technical skill in a distro - a mature person will recognize their own
>> limitations and exercise due diligence when stepping outside of them. 
>> Instead of playing 20 questions and going back and forth with recruits,
>> maybe a better approach would be to cut down the questions dramatically
>> (or more clearly put their answers in the documentation), and then use
>> other approaches like references and interviews.  A new recruit might
>> be given the names of 5 devs that they will need to interview with for
>> 30-60 minutes by phone or IRC (preference on phone), and they will need
>> to submit references, who will be contacted.  When we hire people at
>> work we don't play trivial pursuit with them, we use an interview to
>> get a feel for what they're like and how they handle situations, and we
>> screen resumes and references to determine experience.  I'm sure any of
>> the professional linux distros would work in the same way, but perhaps
>> somebody should ask around and see how it is done elsewhere.
>> 
>> 
> I'm not exactly sure how you'd want the references to work, I mean, as
> in prior jobs/projects worked on? I know that I'd like to help out with
> development, but as it stands I don't think I have the necessary skills
> (various programming language etc), so that is something I'm working on.

I expect rich0 had in mind (tho I won't claim to speak for him) something 
a bit broader when referring to references.  Certainly, in the FLOSS world 
many people are self-taught to some degree or another, and many are 
volunteers, so references in the traditional job sense may not be 
available.

But in the FLOSS world, the term is indeed often used in a broader sense.  
For instance, if I were to "apply", I'd list my long-time involvement on 
the pan (Internet news client) lists, where my involvement hasn't been as 
much in the technical sense but in helping out users, and ideally, in 
being an interface between users and devs such that devs need spend less 
time helping users and can spend more time developing. =:^)

In Gentoo, not only my record of involvement on the amd64 list and here 
(I've followed the dev list, as much to get a heads-up on what's coming 
before it hits as anything else, since 2004.0, before I even had Gentoo 
successfully installed, as that wasn't until 2004.1), but on bugs.gentoo.

Even if those aren't particularly technical references, they absolutely 
demonstrate consistency and integrity in community contribution.  Those 
references demonstrate integrity, in terms both of length of commitment, 
and security-wise.  If I'm a bad guy, I must be a pretty **** patient one! 
=:^)

Others won't have that length of service to point to, but they have an IRC 
handle that has come to be identified with cooperativeness and willingness 
to help and to learn.  Bugday participation is a very solid reference, as 
is work on one of the overlays with reasonably heavy community 
involvement, be it a specialized one like the java or kde overlays, or a 
couple of ebuilds on sunrise.  There's also the forums, with their very 
direct and practical mechanism for recognizing frequent and helpful 
posters, and lets not forget the reference points a well developed doc 
submission (and docs takes plain text submissions too, I'm told, right 
nightmorph?) is going to be worth. These sorts of references can be 
developed in perhaps six months or so, rather less if you've already a 
partially developed docs addition in mind.

> As a consequence I naturally don't have any references (and might not by
> the time I feel ready) but that wouldn't necessarily mean that I'm not
> qualified to be working as a dev. Also one could imagine that a number
> of other people without references, but the necessary qualifications
> might think "To hell with this, I'll just put my effots somewhere else".

Keep in mind that for many of the above, the six months to the 
establishment of a reasonable record may be well underway before one ever 
decides to take their Gentoo contributions to the next level.  As with 
character and community references for a job or rental/lease, if you're 
finding yourself having to deliberately develop them, you're probably 
going about it the wrong way -- by the time you /need/ them, you should 
find you just /have/ them, or something's wrong.

IOW, just the fact of this one post is already contributing to the 
formation of a reference of community involvement. =:^)

> Another thing, you write that phone is preferred but I know that I act
> relaxed in text with new people and as myself. Whereas on the phone I
> hold back a bit, and don't really act myself. So perhaps the preference
> should be the manner in which the one being interviewed is more
> comfortable with and will act more naturally.

Agreed.  

It's interesting, as I'm rather the opposite of you.  Personal experience 
has demonstrated well enough to me that I don't do well in instant text 
contexts, be it texting/IM/IRC.  OTOH, I'm reasonably comfortable on the 
phone (and VoIP is nice =:^), and on the "async" messaging protocols such 
as email/lists/newsgroups/forums, etc, with newsgroups being a strong 
favorite.

Some months, <shrug> maybe a year ago, now, someone mentioned (here) that 
an IRC interview was a requirement for Gentoo devhood.  I followed up on 
that, asking about it, and was basically told that if someone's not 
willing to do even just the one IRC interview, they may as well not 
bother, Gentoo's simply not interested in them as a dev, period.  The 
position was that refusing to do just that one session, if that's all you 
wanted to do, was simply being petty.

Well, I was actually rather glad to get that clarified, because from the 
beginning I've always tried to contribute what I could, and always figured 
the logical end result of that, if I ever got there, was that I'd probably 
end up a Gentoo dev at some point.  I've already been around for six 
years, and see no reason I'd not be around in double that again, 12 years 
out, if Gentoo's still active by then.  But I'm simply not going to waste 
my time with stuff I know I'm terrible at just to satisfy some hoop-jump 
requirement, when there's way more FLOSS community projects begging for my 
time than I have time to give them.

So maybe I AM being petty and ridiculous in refusing that hoop-jump.  But 
it seems to me the shoe fits just as well on the other foot, too.  But 
OTOH, maybe IRC /is/ a vital skill for a Gentoo dev, thus justifying that 
hoop.  Regardless, I'm glad I know it now, as now, whenever I read about 
the severe lack of devs, I know Gentoo can't use me in that capacity 
anyway, so I don't have to think about it any more.  I can be just a user 
and contribute where I can, here and elsewhere.  And as any other user, if 
Gentoo ultimately goes down the tubes due to lack of dev interest, well 
<shrug>, it's too bad I guess, but as with most users, I'll eventually 
find another distribution.  And I /am/ reading good things about Arch, 
lately. =:^)

But meanwhile, Gentoo remains, I believe, the best possible match for me 
/as/ a "power user"; one now affirmed in that status; one who actually 
appreciates the ability to control what's on his system and how the 
components interact with each other at a level of detail that's difficult 
or impossible to get with most distributions.  If as a Gentoo user it's 
going to be, a Gentoo user I've been for six years and a Gentoo user I may 
very well be in another six years, doubled, tripled even, if Gentoo's 
still around for me by then...

Or maybe this thread'll trigger some change, and I'll eventually end up a 
Gentoo dev, with a bigger bit than it presently seems in shaping the 
possibility of having a healthy Gentoo a dozen years from now.  User or 
dev, doesn't matter.  If my contributions help the chances of there being 
a healthy Gentoo for me to still be using a dozen years from now, I'm 
happy. =:^)  Otherwise, there's certainly other places and projects 
that'll welcome those contributions, and if Gentoo dies due to lack of 
interest from those deemed qualified, holding the fort until the end, 
well, there's other distributions. too, and I'm sure I'll find a place as 
a user of one of them.

-- 
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] Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Magnus Granberg]

lördag 03 april 2010 12.19.19 skrev Tobias Scherbaum:
> > > - hardened-sources are nowadays only available in an experimental
> > > overlay, lots of users keep asking what's happening to the
> > > hardened-sources on both the -dev but also the -hardened mailinglist.
> > > Yeah, we do have people working on hardened stuff, but if people just
> > > take what's happening in the portage tree they might think that the
> > > hardened stuff they're relying on for their business isn't supported
> > > any longer.
> >
> > With Zorry we just got a new recruit for working on hardened things,
> > especially toolchain. It's not as dead as you make it sound ...
> 
> Good to see there's something happening in hardened - but still, the
> user outside of Gentoo still only is seeing: "Oh, no hardened-sources
> update for nearly a year."
> 
How long did it take for Hardened GCC to move to 4.X?  And we are still 
lacking SSP support in the tree. We have lost almost all dev's in the herd the 
past years.  As for hardened-sources we are working on it but that work has 
not hit the tree yet and that not a good situation. It will hit the tree soner 
or later. We work on our free time to and we don't have all the free time in 
the world to work on it. There is a long todo list. It is very time comsuming 
work on the toolchain, kernel, docs, bugs, recruit and help users at the same 
time. As tree dev that do all the work but we have users and some devs that 
help out too and that we are thankful for ther help. Hopefully we have 
something on the  hardened-sources after next meeting. 

@ Paweł Hajdan, Jr. you could ask in hardened-kernel@gentoo.org what thay need 
for help or join #gentoo-hardened @ freenode.net
And the hardened-sources in the hardened-development overlay have some 
regreesions that we are working on to fix.
Sorry if i bing roude.

Hardened at gentoo.org
Magnus Granberg (Zorry) <zorry@gentoo.org>

[gentoo-dev][Gentoo Phoenix] Re: Is Gentoo a Phoenix?

[Ben de Groot]

On 3 April 2010 11:46, Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 04/03/10 11:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
>> Hell no, but ...
>>
>> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive way.
>> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas were
>> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
>
> So what are _you_ doing to make it better?

I like that attitude! And I'm so going to steal your idea about the phoenix.
I'll start using the [Gentoo Phoenix] tag for discussions about how we
can make Gentoo better. Maybe we could even start a project for it,
trying to bring together ideas and people who want to improve things.
I have several things I wanted to start a discussion about already, and
it seems these things are in the air now as I see these topics popping
up left and right now. I'll fork off from this discussion into some specific
things in order to try to keep things a bit organized.


>> So - what to do now?
> For me it's simple. I try to
> - dedicate time to fixing things. Takes lots of time, can be demotivating

As I've recently refocussed my Gentoo activities on Qt, and withdrawn
from various other herds I was involved in, I now have some time and
motivation to pick up something new. I wish to dedicate this to something
that will really help and I believe these discussions are a good starting
point. I hope it will trigger others in similar ways.

Cheers,
-- 
Ben de Groot
Gentoo Linux Qt project lead developer

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Roy Bamford]

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On 2010.04.03 10:16, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Hell no, but ...
> 
> We have lots of quite understaffed areas, to sum up in a positive 
> way.
> Summing it up the negative way one might say, we have lots of areas
> were
> users might get the idea Gentoo already is dead.
> 
> For example:
[snip lots of anecdotal evidence]
> - Tobias
> 
> -- 
> Praxisbuch Nagios
> http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/
> 
> https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum
> 

First, we need some metrics - the first step to controlling anything is 
to measure it.

Once we have some metrics, we can prioritise.

With priorities, we can identify gaps in our resource pool (not just 
people) and attempt to fill them with recruiting.

Maybe thats a bugday topic ?
An open day for users who would like to become contributors and 
contributors who would like to become devs.

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
gentoo-ops
forum-mods
trustees


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

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Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 15:40 +0100 schrieb Roy Bamford:
> First, we need some metrics - the first step to controlling anything is 
> to measure it.

So, how do you want to measure those metrics? I for one can't think of a
useful algorithm which helps to identify understaffed or orphaned areas.
Sure, one might take a look at the number of packages compared with open
bugs for example - but in the end that still won't give you some useful
metrics.

If someone has a feeling somewhere helping hands are missing or an area
is orphaned - that's the best "metrics" we can get.

- Tobias

-- 
Praxisbuch Nagios
http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/

https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 7:59 AM, Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 15:40 +0100 schrieb Roy Bamford:
>> First, we need some metrics - the first step to controlling anything is
>> to measure it.
>
> So, how do you want to measure those metrics? I for one can't think of a
> useful algorithm which helps to identify understaffed or orphaned areas.
> Sure, one might take a look at the number of packages compared with open
> bugs for example - but in the end that still won't give you some useful
> metrics.

When I was a treecleaner I tended to look at a few things; note that
because we enforce very little in the tree these are basically just a
set of heuristics.

 - metadata.xml: how many packages are maintainer-{needed,wanted}.
Does not apply to all herds because some herds fix anything in their
herd.
 - date of last commit: Gentoo is fast moving and packages that
haven't had commits since 200{4,5,6} are probably old, unmaintained
and may not even compile or run.
 - date of last listed maintainer commit versus last commit:
Basically if the maintainer hasn't touched the ebuild in a while but
someone else (herd members?) have, the metadata.xml is probably out of
date.

The above are all pretty easy to do with the data in the tree.  Some
other useful ideas might be:
 - compare open bugs for the package, when was the last bug for a
package closed (bugs data kinda sucks for this)
 - for a given package in a herd, check the version in the tree
against freshmeat or similar to see how far behind it is (I think
someone wrote something for this already, exherbo?)
 - check imlate to see if keywording is behind (is the maintainer
filing stablereqs?)

Metrics do not have to be perfect (they never are...) but they may
shine some light on some areas of the tree that need staff.

-A


>
> If someone has a feeling somewhere helping hands are missing or an area
> is orphaned - that's the best "metrics" we can get.
>
> - Tobias
>
> --
> Praxisbuch Nagios
> http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/
>
> https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum
>

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Matti Bickel]

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Alec Warner wrote:
> The above are all pretty easy to do with the data in the tree.  Some
> other useful ideas might be:
>  - compare open bugs for the package, when was the last bug for a
> package closed (bugs data kinda sucks for this)

An additional search: last touched by assignee between never and now-30
days.

I also just discovered that awesome query interface our bugzilla has.

Can we publish a data set query where new bugs are plotted against
closed bugs (maybe add already open bugs) for each herd? I'll try to
come up with a query if no one else is faster with this.

If the difference between new and closed bugs in a 30 days time period
is over a given threshold (say 15% of the current open bugs), this might
be a herd that needs help.

Maybe we can come up with more insightful bugzie searches. And maybe
something like that exists already and i've failed finding it.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/03/10 18:03, Alec Warner wrote:
>  - date of last commit: Gentoo is fast moving and packages that
> haven't had commits since 200{4,5,6} are probably old, unmaintained
> and may not even compile or run.
>  - date of last listed maintainer commit versus last commit:
> Basically if the maintainer hasn't touched the ebuild in a while but
> someone else (herd members?) have, the metadata.xml is probably out of
> date.

Have the result of that analysis collected somewhere?


> The above are all pretty easy to do with the data in the tree.  Some
> other useful ideas might be:
>  - compare open bugs for the package, when was the last bug for a
> package closed (bugs data kinda sucks for this)

Right, but we can get that working.  I have a regex to get package
names from bug titles around that works well.  All we need to do is fix
all bug titles ever to contain package names: Could take a whole bugday
or two :-)


>  - for a given package in a herd, check the version in the tree
> against freshmeat or similar to see how far behind it is (I think
> someone wrote something for this already, exherbo?)

That's a larger project.  GSOC ideas should contain such thing.


>  - check imlate to see if keywording is behind (is the maintainer
> filing stablereqs?)

While you mention that: it's the first time I hear a maintainer should
do that.  if so can you raise awareness of it and explain the what and
why in another thread on gentoo-dev?



Sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Roy Bamford]

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On 2010.04.03 15:59, Tobias Scherbaum wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 03.04.2010, 15:40 +0100 schrieb Roy Bamford:
> > First, we need some metrics - the first step to controlling 
> anything
> is 
> > to measure it.
> 
> So, how do you want to measure those metrics? I for one can't think 
> of a useful algorithm which helps to identify understaffed or 
> orphaned areas.
> Sure, one might take a look at the number of packages compared with
> open
> bugs for example - but in the end that still won't give you some
> useful
> metrics.

It doesn't much matter what we measure as long as it related to what we 
want to control and that we do not change the metric. That way the 
metrics remain useful.

Open bugs per package and mean age of bugs per package come to mind.
Such per package metrics can be aggregated per herd, per project, the 
whole of Gentoo or whatever.

A reducing mean age of bugs and open bugs shows we are moving in the 
right direction.

I'm sure many other metrics are possible.


> 
> If someone has a feeling somewhere helping hands are missing or an
> area
> is orphaned - that's the best "metrics" we can get.

Feelings?
The problem with feelings is that they keep changing
 
Let me remind you of this Carl Sagan quote ...

I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial 
intelligence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of 
places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I 
say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial 
intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for 
it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I 
just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut 
feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to 
reserve judgment until the evidence is in. - Carl Sagan, The Burden Of 
Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 

The important bit being "it's okay to reserve judgment until the 
evidence is in".


> 
> - Tobias
> 
> -- 
> Praxisbuch Nagios
> http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/pbnagiosger/
> 
> https://www.xing.com/profile/Tobias_Scherbaum
> 

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
gentoo-ops
forum-mods
trustees


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Sebastian Pipping]

On 04/04/10 22:48, Roy Bamford wrote:
> Open bugs per package and mean age of bugs per package come to mind.
> Such per package metrics can be aggregated per herd, per project, the 
> whole of Gentoo or whatever.
> 
> A reducing mean age of bugs and open bugs shows we are moving in the 
> right direction.

We're not too far away from such numbers actually, stay tuned.


> I'm sure many other metrics are possible.

If more comes to you mind please reply to the heartbug team force thread
with it.  We're interested in these ideas.



Sebastian

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Joshua Saddler]

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On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:16:32 +0200
Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
 
> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
> documentation wiki, but ... 

Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts. There are lots of visible changes, and I make a point of getting the word out when a new guide turns up in /doc/. I blog about the new docs I add, and I spend awhile working with contributors to make sure we get good stuff out there and that it's constantly updated -- the Openbox guide Nate Zachary wrote comes to mind. I'm also always working with developers who are writing docs in their spare time, coaching 'em through the process, assisting with GuideXML, taking patches, *and* creating patches and updates for devs who are posting documents in /proj/ and in their personal devspace. But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you.

Oh yes, and I spend hours each week constantly updating docs based on the inflow of bugs, forum reports, and I constantly re-read each one and improve stuff where I can on-the-fly. Not everything has a bug tracker, but the end result is still a visible difference in the stuff you see on the website.

> - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
> someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
> asleep.

We've added quite a bit, with the automated feeds and whatnot. And the sidebar stuff. And the revamping of our releases page, and lots of other areas. I've added lots of stuff; I guess you just haven't noticed.

> - Speaking of our website, PR ... guess there's nothing more to add. 

Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts here, too. Take SCALE last month. I guess all the work I did to organize SCALE and go out and make a difference with our (potential) users by talking with them doesn't mean anything. All the word-of-mouth I've done with folks before and after SCALE, even my coworkers must not count for much.

* * *

I would have expected such this kind of negative, abrasive email from a user, but to see such a sensationalist letter coming from a developer is disappointing, to say the least. I expect better from you. Because whether you realize it or not, your email can only come across as denigrating my efforts, and everyone else who puts in hard work on (actually visible!) changes.

Your email was inflammatory and offensive, but not in the way that motivates me to do more or do anything different. It came across as extremely demotivational.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 6:48 PM, Joshua Saddler <nightmorph@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:16:32 +0200
> Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
>> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
>> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
>> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
>> documentation wiki, but ...
>
> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts. There are lots of visible changes, and I make a point of getting the word out when a new guide turns up in /doc/. I blog about the new docs I add, and I spend awhile working with contributors to make sure we get good stuff out there and that it's constantly updated -- the Openbox guide Nate Zachary wrote comes to mind. I'm also always working with developers who are writing docs in their spare time, coaching 'em through the process, assisting with GuideXML, taking patches, *and* creating patches and updates for devs who are posting documents in /proj/ and in their personal devspace. But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you.
>
> Oh yes, and I spend hours each week constantly updating docs based on the inflow of bugs, forum reports, and I constantly re-read each one and improve stuff where I can on-the-fly. Not everything has a bug tracker, but the end result is still a visible difference in the stuff you see on the website.

You need to take comments less personally.  If there is a constant
stream of updates then point him at your cia comment log or similar;
no need to pick a fight about it.  Certainly when compared to our
documentation of old I think the rate of new documents and document
updates is likely less now than it was then.  Perhaps what Tobias is
trying to convey is that he wants more people to contribute and write
documents.

>
>> - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
>> someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
>> asleep.
>
> We've added quite a bit, with the automated feeds and whatnot. And the sidebar stuff. And the revamping of our releases page, and lots of other areas. I've added lots of stuff; I guess you just haven't noticed.

Lots of content sure; not so much on the design side.  I personally
like our website and I think the design is fine (no need to put too
much effort into it IMHO.) but if other folks want to spend time on it
I'm not going to say no.  I still think something like taking what we
have and doing the redesign on non-gentoo stuff and then being like
'yo dawg I heard you like websites so i put a website in your website
so you can browse while you browse' or similar is the way to iterate.

>
>> - Speaking of our website, PR ... guess there's nothing more to add.
>
> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts here, too. Take SCALE last month. I guess all the work I did to organize SCALE and go out and make a difference with our (potential) users by talking with them doesn't mean anything. All the word-of-mouth I've done with folks before and after SCALE, even my coworkers must not count for much.
>
> * * *
>
> I would have expected such this kind of negative, abrasive email from a user, but to see such a sensationalist letter coming from a developer is disappointing, to say the least. I expect better from you. Because whether you realize it or not, your email can only come across as denigrating my efforts, and everyone else who puts in hard work on (actually visible!) changes.
>
> Your email was inflammatory and offensive, but not in the way that motivates me to do more or do anything different. It came across as extremely demotivational.
>

Well it certainly hi-lights one area; that we often fail at
communicating what we are doing.  The pr team has some great people on
it who do great stuff (not including me; I tend to do as little as
possible.)  Maybe Tobias is blissfully unaware of the efforts of the
team.  Maybe he thinks the team can do better.  I don't see him saying
'well the pr team sucks balls!'  I see him saying 'well the pr team is
very quiet.'  I don't think that is too far from the truth; although
certainly pr@ is active it doesn't look like it from anyone not on
that alias (SCALE aside.)

-A

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Dale]

Alec Warner wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 6:48 PM, Joshua Saddler<nightmorph@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>    
>> On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:16:32 +0200
>> Tobias Scherbaum<dertobi123@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
>>> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
>>> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
>>> documentation wiki, but ...
>>>        
>> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts. There are lots of visible changes, and I make a point of getting the word out when a new guide turns up in /doc/. I blog about the new docs I add, and I spend awhile working with contributors to make sure we get good stuff out there and that it's constantly updated -- the Openbox guide Nate Zachary wrote comes to mind. I'm also always working with developers who are writing docs in their spare time, coaching 'em through the process, assisting with GuideXML, taking patches, *and* creating patches and updates for devs who are posting documents in /proj/ and in their personal devspace. But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you.
>>
>> Oh yes, and I spend hours each week constantly updating docs based on the inflow of bugs, forum reports, and I constantly re-read each one and improve stuff where I can on-the-fly. Not everything has a bug tracker, but the end result is still a visible difference in the stuff you see on the website.
>>      
> You need to take comments less personally.  If there is a constant
> stream of updates then point him at your cia comment log or similar;
> no need to pick a fight about it.  Certainly when compared to our
> documentation of old I think the rate of new documents and document
> updates is likely less now than it was then.  Perhaps what Tobias is
> trying to convey is that he wants more people to contribute and write
> documents.
>
>    
>>      
>>> - Website redesign - we had a contest some years ago, got a winner,
>>> someone started to adapt the design and somewhat that project fall
>>> asleep.
>>>        
>> We've added quite a bit, with the automated feeds and whatnot. And the sidebar stuff. And the revamping of our releases page, and lots of other areas. I've added lots of stuff; I guess you just haven't noticed.
>>      
> Lots of content sure; not so much on the design side.  I personally
> like our website and I think the design is fine (no need to put too
> much effort into it IMHO.) but if other folks want to spend time on it
> I'm not going to say no.  I still think something like taking what we
> have and doing the redesign on non-gentoo stuff and then being like
> 'yo dawg I heard you like websites so i put a website in your website
> so you can browse while you browse' or similar is the way to iterate.
>
>    
>>      
>>> - Speaking of our website, PR ... guess there's nothing more to add.
>>>        
>> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts here, too. Take SCALE last month. I guess all the work I did to organize SCALE and go out and make a difference with our (potential) users by talking with them doesn't mean anything. All the word-of-mouth I've done with folks before and after SCALE, even my coworkers must not count for much.
>>
>> * * *
>>
>> I would have expected such this kind of negative, abrasive email from a user, but to see such a sensationalist letter coming from a developer is disappointing, to say the least. I expect better from you. Because whether you realize it or not, your email can only come across as denigrating my efforts, and everyone else who puts in hard work on (actually visible!) changes.
>>
>> Your email was inflammatory and offensive, but not in the way that motivates me to do more or do anything different. It came across as extremely demotivational.
>>
>>      
> Well it certainly hi-lights one area; that we often fail at
> communicating what we are doing.  The pr team has some great people on
> it who do great stuff (not including me; I tend to do as little as
> possible.)  Maybe Tobias is blissfully unaware of the efforts of the
> team.  Maybe he thinks the team can do better.  I don't see him saying
> 'well the pr team sucks balls!'  I see him saying 'well the pr team is
> very quiet.'  I don't think that is too far from the truth; although
> certainly pr@ is active it doesn't look like it from anyone not on
> that alias (SCALE aside.)
>
> -A
>
>    

As a user, I see both sides of this.  I rarely go to the actual Gentoo 
site and mostly read the home page when I do.  I may go to a link once 
in a while that is posted on the mailing list but that is about it.

I think what I see from the OP is that he feels there needs to be more 
people involved in several areas.  I don't know you Joshua but if you 
are doing a lot of the docs by yourself or with just a few helpers, I 
think you need more help.  The pages I do see are really good and I read 
other people using other distros commend Gentoo on its documentation.  
It just that maybe you need more help so that even more things can be 
done.  Look at it this way, what would happen if you had twice the help 
you have now and where would Gentoo's docs be a year from now?

I'm not trying to put words in the OPs mouth here but just trying to see 
it from the point of view that he wants things to be better with more 
people involved.  Personally, I wish Gentoo had twice of everything it 
has now.  Not that things would be that much better but that people 
wouldn't burn out and feel like they are loaded down when things pop 
up.  I felt sorry for the KDE folks when KDE4 was released.  It just had 
to be a nightmare to get all that in the tree at once.  If they had 
twice as many people working on it tho, it would have been easier.  The 
people doing all that work wouldn't feel like they had to work so hard 
to get everything ready.

Back to my hole now.

Dale

:-)  :-)

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 04-04-2010 04:50, Dale wrote:
> I felt sorry for the KDE folks when KDE4 was released.  It just had
> to be a nightmare to get all that in the tree at once.  If they had
> twice as many people working on it tho, it would have been easier.  The
> people doing all that work wouldn't feel like they had to work so hard
> to get everything ready.
> 
> Back to my hole now.
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-)

Dale,

now that we've moved well past beyond that point and that we have a
"reasonably" staffed team, let me thank you for your sympathy, agree
with you about how extra hands would have helped much and admit that was
a very tough time.

- -- 
Regards,

Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org
Gentoo- forums / Userrel / Devrel / KDE / Elections
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

Joshua Saddler wrote lots of:
> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts.

See, this is not about your personal efforts. I really do appreciate the
work and time you invest in improving both the docs and PR. But otoh try
to compare what the docs-team and PR did say 5 years ago and what they're
doing today (at least what becomes visible for people outside of these
projects).

5 years ago we had constantly new docs added, we still had our Gentoo
Weekly Newsletter - both just some *examples*. Nothing against you
personal efforts, but both (important!) areas could be improved and be
made more active again.

- Tobias

Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Joshua Saddler]

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On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 10:22:06 +0200
"Tobias Scherbaum" <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:

> 5 years ago [...] constantly added [...]

You need to clarify your metric. How are you defining constant? How often does a new document need to appear?

What mostly happens is steady refinement and expansion of our existing docs, occasionally splitting off long portions into their own document, or merging a few back together where appropriate.

Stuff that's written fully from scratch is much rarer than you think, and it's been that way for a long time. I'm not saying that's a bad thing; that's just how it is.

Two noteworthy exceptions: 2005 and 2006. Those were years when we had all the English speaking GDP members writing. I came on board in 2005 and immediately helped crank out docs and updates, and worked with folks to get new stuff into the tree. 2005 was a good year both for the GDP and for external contributors to help write stuff and add patches, which is why we saw much more diversity in our new docs.

Since then, the list of active English writers in the GDP has declined to one and it's been that way for a few years now, so that partly explains the slowdown in docs. Another is that we just aren't getting as many new submissions since the days when (apparently) we had more willing developers to pitch in with the docs.

Many of the 2005/2006 guides have had their primary authors/contributors disappear, leaving us without an easy way to keep them up-to-date. The GDP can't maintain a doc if we don't have someone, internal or external, who can devote time to keeping docs up-to-date. Lots of those 2005/2006 additions need serious overhaul, or I'll have to mark 'em deprecated/draft or even remove them entirely.

Some of the guides written years ago have been removed from the tree. Part of maintaining documents is not just writing new ones, but treecleaning, if you will, our existing collection. It's not as attention-getting as a totally new guide. I can't promise attention-getting news releases for every doc or website change I make.

* * *

Here, I'll take 2 hours to go through our complete CVS history for our docs in /doc/en/ and create a list of what was added or removed in the last 5 years.

This list doesn't *begin* to include total rewrites or near-total rewrites (such as the printing, gnome, X11 guides) or whether the rewrites were made in just one day or over time as packages and methods have evolved. It doesn't cover the handbooks, nor the handbooks I wrote entirely from scratch in 2006 to cover the new GLI installers (and their subsequent removal after 2008's releases).

It also does not include documents that have since been marked "draft" or "deprecated" or some other maintainance status besides "active." I expect some of the docs on this list to still be in "draft" or to have moved to it or "deprecated," so whether they really count is up to you to decide. If you want to average docs on a monthly or yearly basis . . . you can tweak the numbers all you want.

Note, also, that just because you don't see a doc on it in the last 5 years doesn't mean we don't already have a wealth of published info on a subject in our existing documentation. Something that was added in, say, 2002 or 2004 is prolly very complete, and covers lots of stuff you'd normally find in separate articles elsewhere, for example on wikis. I'm not putting much here besides the files added/removed.

This is just stuff that's initially added to or removed from CVS.

*2010*

Nothing totally new added nor anything completely removed. Hey, the year is young. Lots of rewrites though.


*2009*

Same. Mostly extensive rewrites, most notably the handbooks to take into account the autobuilds.

New: bind-guide.xml
New: lxde-howto.xml
New: openbox.xml
Removed: ldapdns-guide.xml (added 2006)
Removed: gentoo-sparc-quickinstall.xml (added 2004)

*2008*

New: multipath.xml
New: nagios-guide.xml (draft)
New: openrc-migration.xml
Removed: apache-developer.xml (added 2005)
Removed: apache-troubleshooting.xml (added 2005)
Removed: apache-upgrading.xml (added 2005)
Removed: kde-config.xml (added 2004)
Removed: kde-split-ebuilds (added 2005)

*2007*

New: gcc-optimization.xml
New: pda-guide.xml (draft)
New: vpnc-howto.xml
New: xen-guide.xml
New: xfce-config.xml
Removed: colinux-howto.xml (added 2004)
Removed: mysql-upgrade-slotted (added 2006, but mysql team reverted SLOTting)
Removed: nx-guide.xml (added 2004)
Removed: openmosix-howto.xml (added 2003)

*2006*

New: change-chost.xml
New: conky-howto.xml
New: cross-compiling-distcc.xml
New: gentoo-alpha-faq.xml
New: gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2-quickinstall.xml
New: info-guide.xml
New: jffnms.xml
New: kernel-config.xml
New: ldapdns-guide.xml (removed 2009)
New: liveusb.xml
New: man-guide.xml
New: portage-utils.xml
New: postgres-howto.xml
New: vdr-guide.xml
New: zsh.xml
Removed: java-old.xml (added 2006)
Removed: vserver-howto.xml (added 2005)

*2005*

New: apache-developer.xml (removed 2008)
New: apache-troubleshooting.xml (removed 2008)
New: apache-upgrading.xml (removed 2008)
New: bluetooth-guide.xml (deprecated; needs total rewrite)
New: bugzilla-howto.xml
New: fluxbox-config.xml
New: gcc-upgrading.xml (imported from toolchain /proj/ doc)
New: gentoo-amd64-faq.xml
New: gentoo-freebsd.xml (deprecated; needs total rewrite)
New: gentoo-mips-faq.xml
New: gpm.xml
New: grub-error-guide.xml
New: hpc-howto (imported from cluster /proj/ doc)
New: mailfilter-guide.xml
New: mysql-howto.xml
New: mysql-upgrading.xml
New: sudo-guide.xml
New: usb-guide.xml
New: utf-8.xml
New: vserver-howto.xml (removed 2006)
Removed: macos-guide.xml (added 2004)
Removed: gentoo-alpha-compaq-tools.xml (added 2003)
Removed: 2.6-koutput.xml (added 2004)
Removed: 2.6-koutput-user.xml (added 2004)
Removed: gentoo-security.xml (added 2002)
Removed: modular-x-howto.xml (added 2005)

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Petteri Räty]

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On 04/04/2010 04:48 AM, Joshua Saddler wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:16:32 +0200 Tobias Scherbaum
> <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
>> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat
>> maintained, but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both
>> to our docs, but also to our docs-team) for years. People are
>> constantly asking for a documentation wiki, but ...
> 
> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts. There are lots of visible changes,
> and I make a point of getting the word out when a new guide turns up
> in /doc/. I blog about the new docs I add, and I spend awhile working
> with contributors to make sure we get good stuff out there and that
> it's constantly updated -- the Openbox guide Nate Zachary wrote comes
> to mind. I'm also always working with developers who are writing docs
> in their spare time, coaching 'em through the process, assisting with
> GuideXML, taking patches, *and* creating patches and updates for devs
> who are posting documents in /proj/ and in their personal devspace.
> But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you.
> 

But isn't there a problem when it's my not our effort? Ideally we would
have a couple people like you on board. If we stayed quiet about our
perceptions then there was never the opportunity to correct them. I
think the thread was done done constructively not destructively.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Is Gentoo dying?

[Patrick Lauer]

On 04/04/10 03:48, Joshua Saddler wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:16:32 +0200
> Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
>  
>> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
>> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
>> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
>> documentation wiki, but ... 
> 
> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts. There are lots of visible changes, and I make a point of getting the word out when a new guide turns up in /doc/. I blog about the new docs I add, and I spend awhile working with contributors to make sure we get good stuff out there and that it's constantly updated -- the Openbox guide Nate Zachary wrote comes to mind. I'm also always working with developers who are writing docs in their spare time, coaching 'em through the process, assisting with GuideXML, taking patches, *and* creating patches and updates for devs who are posting documents in /proj/ and in their personal devspace. But I guess that doesn't mean anything to you.
> 
> Oh yes, and I spend hours each week constantly updating docs based on the inflow of bugs, forum reports, and I constantly re-read each one and improve stuff where I can on-the-fly. Not everything has a bug tracker, but the end result is still a visible difference in the stuff you see on the website.
> 

See, that's the problem.
*You* are doing a good job. *We* as a team/community/ant colony aren't.

The visible rate of change has slowed down, and from your reply I get
the feeling that there are also fewer people working on docs than in the
past. So how do we improve the situation? What needs to be done so that
you could disappear for a month or two without affecting progress
because there are enough other motivated people sharing the workload?

My long-term goal is still to make me redundant. That way I can take a
break whenever I get frustrated and I can focus on new things whenever I
find something new and shiny to attract my attention...

[gentoo-dev] Re: Is Gentoo dying?

[Duncan]

Patrick Lauer posted on Sun, 04 Apr 2010 10:44:38 +0200 as excerpted:

> On 04/04/10 03:48, Joshua Saddler wrote:
>> On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:16:32 +0200
>> Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>  
>>> - Our formerly outstanding documentation still is somewhat maintained,
>>> but that's it. I haven't seen any new additions (both to our docs, but
>>> also to our docs-team) for years. People are constantly asking for a
>>> documentation wiki, but ...
>> 
>> Thanks for sh**ting on my efforts. There are lots of visible changes,
>> and I make a point of getting the word out when a new guide turns up in
>> /doc/.

>> Oh yes, and I spend hours each week constantly updating docs based on
>> the inflow of bugs, forum reports, and I constantly re-read each one
>> and improve stuff where I can on-the-fly.

> See, that's the problem.
> *You* are doing a good job. *We* as a team/community/ant colony aren't.
> 
> The visible rate of change has slowed down, and from your reply I get
> the feeling that there are also fewer people working on docs than in the
> past. So how do we improve the situation? What needs to be done so that
> you could disappear for a month or two without affecting progress
> because there are enough other motivated people sharing the workload?
> 
> My long-term goal is still to make me redundant. That way I can take a
> break whenever I get frustrated and I can focus on new things whenever I
> find something new and shiny to attract my attention...

Patrick's right, Nightmorph.  I believe pretty much everyone here will 
agree that you carry a pretty heavy load, almost a super-human load for 
one person.  But I've noticed in replies before as well as this one, you 
do seem to be getting burned out.  Which is only to be expected given that 
you ARE handling docs pretty much by yourself a lot of the time.

And I know you've asked for help, and didn't get it, a couple times as 
well.  So you solder on... more and more frustrated and burnt out, but 
afraid to stop, because after all, all of Gentoo's depending on you, and 
it /does/ feel good to have users say how well things went, using the docs 
you've been maintaining... but you're still burning out.

The same thing more or less happened to Jakob.  There were similar signs 
of stress, but Gentoo /was/ relying on him, and all the work he did bug-
wrangling.  Then one day he pretty much dropped off the face of the 
earth... or so it seemed.

It shouldn't have to be that way.  You do a great job; a super-human job 
for one person.  But you ARE just one person and unfortunately you AREN'T 
superhuman!  It's catching up with you, and I know I'm not the only one 
concerned about it.  It's unhealthy for both you and Gentoo.

So don't take this the wrong way and drive off the folks trying to help.  
Maybe, just maybe, this time you'll some of the help you asked for a year 
or whatever it was ago.

Meanwhile, some of us really /do/ appreciate all you've done to hold down 
the fort, so to speak.  I'm sure I don't know the half of it when I say 
it's not been easy, and that I (and apparently others here) /do/ 
appreciate and recognized the almost super-human job you've been doing, 
unfortunately, all too often pretty much single handedly.

-- 
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: Is Gentoo dying?

[George Prowse]

If you want to gauge the feeling in the community there are a couple of 
threads in the forums.

Currently this answer seems to be typical of the general consensus when 
asked what they could do to help Gentoo/become a developer:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6230439.html#6230439