[gentoo-project] Some questions about Gentoo

[gentoo-project] Some questions about Gentoo

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

I'm involved both in Debian and Ubuntu development, and I'm often
frustrated by how little I know about the other distributions. After
discussing this in a blog post[1], I got the impression that I wasn't
alone in that case.

So I decided to do something about that, and to go ask the other
distributions' developers a few questions. If this works well (answers and
interest from other distros), I might do that again, or turn this into
something more formal (for example, a mailing list and/or a wiki would
seem well suited for that).

I started by contacting openSUSE and Fedora developers developers, and got
very interesting answers.  I'll publish the answers on my blog[2], and, if
this proves to raise interest, move them to a wiki.

[1] http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=250
[2] http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/

Here is a first set of questions. In your answers, please avoid codenames
(act as if the reader didn't know anything about your distribution).
Please try to write your answer as a short paragraph, answering all the
sub-questions from the questions at once.

Q1. Packages
How many "pieces of software" do you have in your distribution? Do you
distinguish between "source packages" and "binary packages"? (if yes,
give numbers for both). Are there subdivisions in the set of packages (by
kind of support, by "freeness")? Are all packages supported the same way,
or are there different levels of support? (If different levels, how many
packages are supported with each level?) Are some packages imported from
another distribution, or are most of your packages done from scratch by
your developers ?

Q2. Your developers
What's a "developer" in your distribution? How many developers do you
have? How many of these developers were active in 2007? Does a company
(which one?) employ a large number of developers? Do you have different
"classes" of developers, or does everybody have the same access right to
all your packages? How do you integrate new developers? How do you
handle contributors who don't have access rights to the archive? (is
there some kind of mentoring/sponsoring system?)

Q3. Developers and packages ownership
What's the relationship between developers and packages? Does each
package have an assigned developer, or can everybody modify all packages
without stepping on anyone's toes? Are packages mostly maintained by
teams, or by developers working alone?

Other questions:
- Did I send that mail to the right mailing list?
- Which question should I have asked? What should I ask next?
- Do you think that this initiative is interesting?
- Do you think that this should move to a seperate mailing list? Would
  you participate in such a mailing list?
- Can you suggest a project that could host such a mailing list without
  annoying anyone? :)
- Any other suggestions?

Thank you for reading me so far -- and for answering my questions if you
did. ;) If you want me to ping you when I'll publish the answers, just
drop me a mail.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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[gentoo-project] Re: Some questions about Gentoo

[Christian Faulhammer]

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Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net>:

> I'm involved both in Debian and Ubuntu development, and I'm often
> frustrated by how little I know about the other distributions.

 Why frustrated?  That way you can maintain good set of prejudices...:)

> Q1. Packages
[...]

 Gentoo is special here in some regards.

> - Did I send that mail to the right mailing list?

 In the first place, yes. :)  But this is perfect for our PR team [1] as
they can give you some kind of official answer.

> - Do you think that this initiative is interesting?

 Yes.

V-Li

[1] <URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/pr/>
-- 
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://www.faulhammer.org/>

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