Markos Chandras schrieb:
> On 08/14/2011 05:07 PM, Thomas Sachau wrote:
>> Markos Chandras schrieb:
>>> On 08/14/2011 02:07 PM, Thomas Sachau wrote:
>>>> Markos Chandras schrieb:
>>>>> On 08/14/2011 01:15 PM, Thomas Sachau wrote:
>>>>>> Markos Chandras schrieb:
>>>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This is the first of the items I would like to discuss for
>>>>>>> the next Council agenda (or a later one).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Some time ago, few people proposed to have Council
>>>>>>> appointed leaders for QA and DevRel.
>>>>>
>>>>>> My first question: Why is your proposal restricted to QA and 
>>>>>> DevRel?
>>>>>
>>>>> Cause I believe these teams are crucial to the continuity of 
>>>>> Gentoo project.
>>>
>>>> How do you weight one project against another one? I see it the
>>>> other way round: QA and DevRel are only important, if there is
>>>> some issue not resolved otherwise. But many other projects are
>>>> always important, since they have to maintain things
>>>> continuously. While the council could still decide, if DevRel or
>>>> QA are gone (they just take some workload away), you wont be able
>>>> to get the council to e.g. maintain our infrastructure, ebuilds
>>>> or docs.
>>>
>>> 1) If another project slacks, then bad luck for you. Just mask and 
>>> remove the ebuilds ( see recent zope thread ). There is nothing we
>>> can do about that.
> 
>> If QA or DevRel slacks, this causes even less work, since they dont
>> even maintain ebuilds to mask and remove. It may result in less QA
>> fixes or less mediation between developers, but in any case, where
>> you need a decision, you could always call for the council. Those
>> projects do just some delegated work, which is of course nice, if it
>> comes to the daily work and also, because it reduces the work, that
>> needs to be done by the council. But neither is unreplaceable and the
>> decisions of both teams can already be checked by the council, so i
>> see no real requirement for additional bureaucracy for those 2
>> specific teams.
> 
> I am not talking ajust about decisions. If QA slacks then will then
> Council step up and maintain the QA in the portage? If devrel slacks
> then will the Council do all the recruitment/retirement? These projects
> are vital for the project. I don't know how to explain that in more details.

Every developer is responsible for the QA of the packages he maintains. There are of course some
mistakes happening and sometimes someone does something wrong (intentionally or not), but if there
is no active QA team, this just means, that the users will hit those issues and report them. While
this is not the best way, it still does not mean the end of Gentoo.
While DevRel currently only contains members of recruiters and undertakers, this does not have to
stay that way. Either some recruiter/undertaker could refuse to do additional DevRel work or other
developers not involved in recruitment/retirement could join the DevRel project.

So while recruiters are vital to Gentoo, imho this is not true for DevRel.

>>> 2) Infrastructure is a sensitive team, and does not deal with
>>> ebuild maintenance and portage directly.
> 
>> And if infra slacks? Bad luck for you, just mask and remove the
>> hardware? :-)
> Like I said, this is not related to portage QA. I only care about the
> /usr/portage/* parts and what users see from "outside"

If the master rsync server refuses to run, this will have an impact at what users see from "outside" ;-)

[SNIP]
> 
>> Maybe you should first tell me, how you define activity for QA (and
>> DevRel)?
> Ok, and active QA team is a team that fixes severe and other QA problems
> within 24 hours. Moreover, an active QA team should be there 24/7 for
> someone who needs an advice for them or needs to complain about a
> developer that broke portage. If QA was active the breakages from
> Arfrever's commits would have been spotted months before a severe
> incident occurs.

If your requirement for active QA is that high, i have to tell you, that practially you will never
get the needed manpower together to meet those requirements.