Re: [gentoo-project] Questions for Gentoo Council nominees: Bringing new people

[Mikle Kolyada <zlogene@gentoo.org>]

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On 15.06.2019 13:24, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Jun 2019 12:42:20 +0300 Andrew Savchenko wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>
>> Last year we had a good initiative: it addition to (or even instead
>> of) manifests nominees were asked questions by voters. So let's
>> continue this year.
>>
>> I propose to have one question per thread spawned by this e-mail to
>> keep discussion focused. If you have multiple questions, please
>> start multiple threads. If your question was already asked, please
>> join a thread.
>>
>> I'll ask my questions in subsequent e-mails.
> As almost any FOSS project Gentoo suffers from lack of manpower in
> various areas. While there are technical ways to amend this like
> automation improvements I'd like to focus on bringing new people.
>
> Life changes, some developers eventually quit; number of packages
> is growing (not only in Gentoo, but world-wide), their complexity
> grows. All this requires new developers.
>
> How do you propose to bring new people to our team? What as the
> Council member you can do?

This does not depend on council directly, but I think we must improve
existing polices and procedures, some people who I would like to see
amongst devs tell me that they are literally afraid to start the process
because we have lots of things to learn and some of them are poorly
described. I also think that publicity is a must
(conferences/talks/etc), this usually helps new people to get their
questions answered therefore they are more interested to be involved.

> What do you think on current entrance threshold?
The threshold corresponds 1:1 to the current situation in the distro (I
mean polices demands and general developers qualification), generally
this is not really difficult to become a developer, especially if you
have a good mentor (as a recruiter I can firmly claim that the good
mentor is the 60% of success), enthusiasm and free time.


> What about contributions by non-developers? Should we focus on e.g.
> encouraging proxied maintainers to become developers or should we
> grow out of the tree contributions without git tree access

I'd say being a proxied maintainer is more time consuming deal than the
whole process of becoming a developer.

Also once you became a dev you have much more freedom to help the
distro, so yes.

>
> Best regards,
> Andrew Savchenko


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