[gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Michał Górny]

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Hi, everyone.

I'd like to re-heat a worrying topic. More than once I've noticed that
some projects in Gentoo are either completely defunct or seriously
undermanned. This has been already tackled via the herd->project
conversion but the problem still exist and I'd like to try to solve it
better.

According to a quick grep, we have 175 teams defined right now. With
a quick grep, I get the following histogram:

  Members   Teams
        0       3
        1      36
        2      34
        3      19
        4      20
        5      22
        6      12
  ...

Besides the first two numbers, it doesn't look that bad. However, most
of the time the number of members does not map well into real activity.

I think some of the projects could really do with just new members.
However, not having active developers on the project makes it hard for
someone to actually issue a call for members.

I'm thinking of mailing every project in Gentoo (i.e. mass-mailing 175
projects, some developers will get a lot of mail). The mail would
contain some descriptive text and a list of project members. It would
serve two goals:

1. asking the project to verify its member list (some people still don't
keep their wiki up-to-date),

2. asking the project if they need me to send a call for members.

Projects that are entirely fine could reply with a simple 'ACK'. Others
could ask for help directly. Those who don't reply will be brought to
further consideration.

What do you think? Would you mind getting that amount of mail once?
Any other ideas?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Daniel Campbell]

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On 07/16/2017 02:12 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hi, everyone.
> 
> I'd like to re-heat a worrying topic. More than once I've noticed that
> some projects in Gentoo are either completely defunct or seriously
> undermanned. This has been already tackled via the herd->project
> conversion but the problem still exist and I'd like to try to solve it
> better.
> 
> According to a quick grep, we have 175 teams defined right now. With
> a quick grep, I get the following histogram:
> 
>   Members   Teams
>         0       3
>         1      36
>         2      34
>         3      19
>         4      20
>         5      22
>         6      12
>   ...
> 
> Besides the first two numbers, it doesn't look that bad. However, most
> of the time the number of members does not map well into real activity.
> 
> I think some of the projects could really do with just new members.
> However, not having active developers on the project makes it hard for
> someone to actually issue a call for members.
> 
> I'm thinking of mailing every project in Gentoo (i.e. mass-mailing 175
> projects, some developers will get a lot of mail). The mail would
> contain some descriptive text and a list of project members. It would
> serve two goals:
> 
> 1. asking the project to verify its member list (some people still don't
> keep their wiki up-to-date),
> 
> 2. asking the project if they need me to send a call for members.
> 
> Projects that are entirely fine could reply with a simple 'ACK'. Others
> could ask for help directly. Those who don't reply will be brought to
> further consideration.
> 
> What do you think? Would you mind getting that amount of mail once?
> Any other ideas?
> Getting some new members -- specifically community members who know more
about a given project's topic -- would be very beneficial to Gentoo,
imo. I think some of our projects suffer from Gentoo devs who want to
keep projects (or rather, their packages) alive but lack expertise in
that particular domain, so difficult or odd bugs take longer to diagnose
and fix than they would if there was a project member who was familiar
with the software. The alternative is of course disbanding the
project(s) and dropping the packages, but to me that should be used as a
last resort.

Which of our outreach avenues has proven the most effective? If we have
a call for contributors, are we equipped to onboard enough people --
proxy-maint or otherwise -- to bring activity to these smaller projects?

I'm admittedly not a people person, so I'm not sure how I can help.
-- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net
fpr: AE03 9064 AE00 053C 270C  1DE4 6F7A 9091 1EA0 55D6


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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Matt Turner]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2017 at 2:12 PM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> What do you think? Would you mind getting that amount of mail once?
> Any other ideas?

Sounds fine to me. I've thought about unilaterally dropping people
from project lists, but decided it wasn't worth the inevitable hassle.

I'm basically the only one maintaining X11 packages for about a year
now (team of six officially), with some version bump help from mrueg.
I think the situation with GNOME is similar, but their work is more
difficult which is why it usually takes six months to get a new GNOME
release into Gentoo.

We may be able to get some small gains by better communicating which
projects need help, but I suspect that every developer that joins an
additional undermanned project to help out will just leave some other
project a little more undermanned.

The frustrating thing in the X11 world is that I know a bunch of
upstream people that *use* Gentoo. None of them feel like they have
time or the interest to help maintain things -- but still ask me to do
things in Gentoo.

Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Kent Fredric]

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On Sun, 16 Jul 2017 23:12:42 +0200
Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> What do you think? Would you mind getting that amount of mail once?
> Any other ideas?

From the mail I got, ( which I didn't mind ), I felt there was one
distinguisher that was missing:

"active" vs "passive" membership.

Like, I get the impression ( with perl for instance ) that although
many of its members are "around", and they occasionally "do something",
I'm not sure they can all count as "There" in terms of staff-power
metrics.

If you make one commit every 6 months, are you really still "active"?

Its useful to keep them all on the list, because they're people who
have knowledge and can do the work if it comes there way, so I don't
think *removing* them is the right thing to do.

But for keeping tabs on "do we need more staff or not", it just serves
as a confusing source of data.


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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[M. J. Everitt]

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On 18/07/17 20:56, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Jul 2017 23:12:42 +0200
> Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
>> What do you think? Would you mind getting that amount of mail once?
>> Any other ideas?
> From the mail I got, ( which I didn't mind ), I felt there was one
> distinguisher that was missing:
>
> "active" vs "passive" membership.
>
> Like, I get the impression ( with perl for instance ) that although
> many of its members are "around", and they occasionally "do something",
> I'm not sure they can all count as "There" in terms of staff-power
> metrics.
>
> If you make one commit every 6 months, are you really still "active"?
>
> Its useful to keep them all on the list, because they're people who
> have knowledge and can do the work if it comes there way, so I don't
> think *removing* them is the right thing to do.
>
> But for keeping tabs on "do we need more staff or not", it just serves
> as a confusing source of data.
>
There seem to be a lot of devs who are 'on the list' but I never see in
commit logs, etc. Sure they're devs alright, but they're not devaway,
and yet they don't appear to be providing any meaningful contribution.

I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
results could be very telling ...


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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Kent Fredric]

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On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
"M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:

> I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
> compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
> 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
> results could be very telling ...

Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the team*.

For some, there's no reason for them to devaway: 

- They're on IRC
- They commit daily

But they're on teams they seldom do things in.

This is probably more true the more teams you're on.

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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[M. J. Everitt]

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On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
> "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
>
>> I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
>> compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
>> 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
>> results could be very telling ...
> Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the team*.
>
> For some, there's no reason for them to devaway: 
>
> - They're on IRC
> - They commit daily
>
> But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
>
> This is probably more true the more teams you're on.
Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....


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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Michał Górny]

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On wto, 2017-07-18 at 22:35 +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:
> On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
> > "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
> > > compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
> > > 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
> > > results could be very telling ...
> > 
> > Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the team*.
> > 
> > For some, there's no reason for them to devaway: 
> > 
> > - They're on IRC
> > - They commit daily
> > 
> > But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
> > 
> > This is probably more true the more teams you're on.
> 
> Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
> IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
> contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
> interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....

Well, that *is* a problem. However, we are supposed to be friendly
and nice, and not tell other developers that they have done literally
nothing during the 2 years they're part of some project. That could
discourage them from contributing.

You are also not supposed to try to offload yourself and distribute
the work to them. That's bossing around, and it discourages others from
actually doing anything.

So, well, you're just supposed to smile and thank them for doing nothing
for the project because otherwise they could feel offended
and discouraged from doing anything,

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[M. J. Everitt]

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On 18/07/17 22:40, Michał Górny wrote:
> On wto, 2017-07-18 at 22:35 +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:
>> On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:
>>> On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
>>> "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
>>>> compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
>>>> 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
>>>> results could be very telling ...
>>> Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the team*.
>>>
>>> For some, there's no reason for them to devaway: 
>>>
>>> - They're on IRC
>>> - They commit daily
>>>
>>> But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
>>>
>>> This is probably more true the more teams you're on.
>> Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
>> IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
>> contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
>> interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....
> Well, that *is* a problem. However, we are supposed to be friendly
> and nice, and not tell other developers that they have done literally
> nothing during the 2 years they're part of some project. That could
> discourage them from contributing.
>
> You are also not supposed to try to offload yourself and distribute
> the work to them. That's bossing around, and it discourages others from
> actually doing anything.
>
> So, well, you're just supposed to smile and thank them for doing nothing
> for the project because otherwise they could feel offended
> and discouraged from doing anything,
>
Very diplomatically put ... *takes hat off* ...


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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Alec Warner]

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On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 5:40 PM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On wto, 2017-07-18 at 22:35 +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:
> > On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:
> > > On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
> > > "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
> > > > compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
> > > > 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
> > > > results could be very telling ...
> > >
> > > Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the
> team*.
> > >
> > > For some, there's no reason for them to devaway:
> > >
> > > - They're on IRC
> > > - They commit daily
> > >
> > > But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
> > >
> > > This is probably more true the more teams you're on.
> >
> > Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
> > IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
> > contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
> > interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....
>
> Well, that *is* a problem. However, we are supposed to be friendly
> and nice, and not tell other developers that they have done literally
> nothing during the 2 years they're part of some project. That could
> discourage them from contributing.
>

> You are also not supposed to try to offload yourself and distribute
> the work to them. That's bossing around, and it discourages others from
> actually doing anything.
>
> So, well, you're just supposed to smile and thank them for doing nothing
> for the project because otherwise they could feel offended
> and discouraged from doing anything,
>

I am reading a lot of frustration in your comments. I know I have been on a
team(s) where this was the case and it was difficult to resolve. I've also
been that person who doesn't contribute but "hangs around". It might be
possible to think about better ways to measure progress and staffing than
just 'people'. Its pretty clear that 'people on the team' has little
relation to 'work done by the team'. So lets try to break that entirely?

I want to be clear that "being friendly and nice" is not necessarily the
reason why we do not encourage the behavior you state. I suspect telling
people they have not done anything recently doesn't necessarily encourage
them to do stuff. Most of them have actual reasons for not contributing
(whatever they may be) and often a simple conversation doesn't magically
free up time for them, nor encourage them to start doing more.

When I read your comments I see some issues being raised:

How do you recruit new people to join a team that already has "a lot of
people" working on problems?
How do you set up incentives to entice existing team members to contribute
more?
Why do people who do nothing stick around?

The most obvious thing to change is what I mentioned earlier, stop focusing
on "number of humans" and focus on things like "backlog of work for team"
and "velocity of team." Note that this requires ~agreement on what other
metric to use (like bug backlog) and tools to measure the backlog and
velocity. The GMN used to have some of these metrics for bugs.

So one idea might be to measure bug backlog and bug velocity. Teams that
have a backlog that is not growing at a large rate, or even teams with
positive velocity (they tend to close all of their bugs eventually or keep
the backlog in a specific range) probably don't need operational help (they
are correctly staffed for their workload.) Teams that have a growing
backlog and negative velocity are understaffed (they will only get further
and further behind.)

Note that these metrics don't necessarily care about the number of people
on the project, or how much each person contributes. It only cares about
the velocity of the project as a whole in relation to their bug queue. Its
certainly not how many projects will want to work (many teams want to keep
bugs open forever, for example.) In the past I've seen a bug "purgatory"
type label used for this, where bugs that someone looked at and decided
"well this is useful to keep open but isn't on the roadmap or we don't
necessarily plan on doing it" gets pushed into the "Purgatory"; it stays in
the bug system (open even!) but we don't count purgatory bugs as part of
the backlog.

I suspect this type of thing would be tough to deploy in Gentoo as a whole
(because people enjoy their particular way of managing their project and
dislike change) but its one idea to try to manage staffing of teams via
different metrics. It also requires a manager; someone who cares about the
bug metrics, to actually look at the metrics and manage the backlog. Given
existing team managers also do not look at their staffing numbers (e.g. the
staffing needs page is poorly maintained) I'm not convinced adopting a
different solution will necessarily have good effects. In the end someone
inside of Gentoo needs to care about things like sourcing, staffing, and
recruiting. Recruiters certainly care about the latter; but I'm not sure
the former has any particular owner.

I'm not sure how we can incentivize developers to contribute more. One
thing we did in the past to recognize developers was to interview them in
the GMN. I had considered doing a similar thing like "top developer of the
month" or something to reward contributions in some way. I had also
considered taking Google's "peer bonus" concept and trying to reward
exceptional contributions with Foundation money (via some kind of voting
process or having the council give out awards or something.) However that
had numerous legal implications (and tax implications for the receiver) and
so it was nixed.

For people who just 'hang around' I think Gentoo as a whole could offer
clearer developer emeritus benefits that might convince people who are not
doing a whole lot to actually accept retirement / emeritus status. A lot of
people stick around to be 'in the group' and to keep their email. As long
as they remain in one project they can stick around! We have the
undertakers project and they do great work; but it can still take many
months / years to actually retire someone determined to stick around but
not contributing anything meaningful.

-A


> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>

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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Ian Stakenvicius]

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On 18/07/17 05:40 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
> On wto, 2017-07-18 at 22:35 +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:
>> On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:
>>> On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
>>> "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
>>>> compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
>>>> 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
>>>> results could be very telling ...
>>>
>>> Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the team*.
>>>
>>> For some, there's no reason for them to devaway: 
>>>
>>> - They're on IRC
>>> - They commit daily
>>>
>>> But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
>>>
>>> This is probably more true the more teams you're on.
>>
>> Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
>> IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
>> contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
>> interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....
> 
> Well, that *is* a problem. However, we are supposed to be friendly
> and nice, and not tell other developers that they have done literally
> nothing during the 2 years they're part of some project. That could
> discourage them from contributing.


OK, so here's the flipside of this.  I'm a member of a few projects
because I help take care of just a couple of things or maybe even just
a gentoo-carried patch.  Being a project member is necessary as I do
want to have the commit rights on the project, but I'm -not- nor ever
meant to be a general project member or overall maintainer or dev.

So does that mean I should remove myself from these projects?  Or
maybe do we just need some sort of 'occasional contributor' status to
the project membership?  Or should things just stay as they are?



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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 1:34 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <axs@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> OK, so here's the flipside of this.  I'm a member of a few projects
> because I help take care of just a couple of things or maybe even just
> a gentoo-carried patch.  Being a project member is necessary as I do
> want to have the commit rights on the project, but I'm -not- nor ever
> meant to be a general project member or overall maintainer or dev.
>

You left out another use case - wanting to follow mail on the project
alias.  I could see cases where somebody isn't interest in a project
in general but works on something related and benefits from seeing the
emails to the alias.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[M. J. Everitt]

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On 19/07/17 19:22, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 1:34 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <axs@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> OK, so here's the flipside of this.  I'm a member of a few projects
>> because I help take care of just a couple of things or maybe even just
>> a gentoo-carried patch.  Being a project member is necessary as I do
>> want to have the commit rights on the project, but I'm -not- nor ever
>> meant to be a general project member or overall maintainer or dev.
>>
> You left out another use case - wanting to follow mail on the project
> alias.  I could see cases where somebody isn't interest in a project
> in general but works on something related and benefits from seeing the
> emails to the alias.
>
I would argue that's a better use for a mailing list than an alias then
.. or at least some kind of 'observer' status in a project ..
I'm not sure from my observations that being on a team alias requires
you to be a project member ..

I'm really not sure what the benefits of a closed alias are, apart from
keeping communications internal, which may be equally well-served being
in the public domain .. unless of course it really is confined to "hi,
I'm tackling bug 12345 this week, thanks,bye" type communications ...
What barriers are there for transferring some key projects to having
their own mailing lists?


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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Mart Raudsepp]

Ühel kenal päeval, K, 19.07.2017 kell 14:22, kirjutas Rich Freeman:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 1:34 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <axs@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> > 
> > OK, so here's the flipside of this.  I'm a member of a few projects
> > because I help take care of just a couple of things or maybe even
> > just
> > a gentoo-carried patch.  Being a project member is necessary as I
> > do
> > want to have the commit rights on the project, but I'm -not- nor
> > ever
> > meant to be a general project member or overall maintainer or dev.
> > 
> 
> You left out another use case - wanting to follow mail on the project
> alias.  I could see cases where somebody isn't interest in a project
> in general but works on something related and benefits from seeing
> the
> emails to the alias.

e-mail alias members and project membership is already disconnect. So
he did not leave out this use case. To monitor a mail alias, you don't
need to be member of the project (but hopefully have an OK from the
project to lurk like this).

Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[James Le Cuirot]

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On Wed, 19 Jul 2017 13:25:31 -0400
Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 5:40 PM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > On wto, 2017-07-18 at 22:35 +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:  
> > > On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:  
> > > > On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
> > > > "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
> > > >  
> > > > > I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
> > > > > compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
> > > > > 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
> > > > > results could be very telling ...  
> > > >
> > > > Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the  
> > team*.  
> > > >
> > > > For some, there's no reason for them to devaway:
> > > >
> > > > - They're on IRC
> > > > - They commit daily
> > > >
> > > > But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
> > > >
> > > > This is probably more true the more teams you're on.  
> > >
> > > Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
> > > IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
> > > contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
> > > interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....  
> >
> > Well, that *is* a problem. However, we are supposed to be friendly
> > and nice, and not tell other developers that they have done literally
> > nothing during the 2 years they're part of some project. That could
> > discourage them from contributing.
> >  
> 
> > You are also not supposed to try to offload yourself and distribute
> > the work to them. That's bossing around, and it discourages others from
> > actually doing anything.
> >
> > So, well, you're just supposed to smile and thank them for doing nothing
> > for the project because otherwise they could feel offended
> > and discouraged from doing anything,
> >  
> 
> I am reading a lot of frustration in your comments. I know I have been on a
> team(s) where this was the case and it was difficult to resolve. I've also
> been that person who doesn't contribute but "hangs around". It might be
> possible to think about better ways to measure progress and staffing than
> just 'people'. Its pretty clear that 'people on the team' has little
> relation to 'work done by the team'. So lets try to break that entirely?
> 
> I want to be clear that "being friendly and nice" is not necessarily the
> reason why we do not encourage the behavior you state. I suspect telling
> people they have not done anything recently doesn't necessarily encourage
> them to do stuff. Most of them have actual reasons for not contributing
> (whatever they may be) and often a simple conversation doesn't magically
> free up time for them, nor encourage them to start doing more.

...

> The most obvious thing to change is what I mentioned earlier, stop focusing
> on "number of humans" and focus on things like "backlog of work for team"
> and "velocity of team." Note that this requires ~agreement on what other
> metric to use (like bug backlog) and tools to measure the backlog and
> velocity. The GMN used to have some of these metrics for bugs.
> 
> So one idea might be to measure bug backlog and bug velocity. Teams that
> have a backlog that is not growing at a large rate, or even teams with
> positive velocity (they tend to close all of their bugs eventually or keep
> the backlog in a specific range) probably don't need operational help (they
> are correctly staffed for their workload.) Teams that have a growing
> backlog and negative velocity are understaffed (they will only get further
> and further behind.)
> 
> Note that these metrics don't necessarily care about the number of people
> on the project, or how much each person contributes. It only cares about
> the velocity of the project as a whole in relation to their bug queue. Its
> certainly not how many projects will want to work (many teams want to keep
> bugs open forever, for example.) In the past I've seen a bug "purgatory"
> type label used for this, where bugs that someone looked at and decided
> "well this is useful to keep open but isn't on the roadmap or we don't
> necessarily plan on doing it" gets pushed into the "Purgatory"; it stays in
> the bug system (open even!) but we don't count purgatory bugs as part of
> the backlog.

Definitely have to agree with this. I'm on the games team but I haven't
done all that much for that project yet. That's largely because I'm
lead of the Java team and I don't feel I'm doing enough there either.
That doesn't mean I want to leave the games team and there is plenty
I'd like to do given the time. I may still fix up the odd thing here
and there and that's certainly better than nothing.

I think there's also another angle to this, particularly when it comes
to Java. I don't think it matters how many developers we can
realistically get, the traditional approach to Java packaging stopped
being scalable years ago. That backlog is growing and we're never going
to catch it up short of taking extremely radical action. This is a hard
problem to solve. I have some ideas but once again, it needs time.
Knowing that our current course is hopeless is also very demotivating
and that just makes a bad situation even worse. I don't want to waste
time doing fruitless package bumps. When users hop onto IRC
enthusiastically asking whether they can package some shiny new thing,
it pains me to tell them that it's probably much harder than they think
and they'd also be wasting their time.

-- 
James Le Cuirot (chewi)
Gentoo Linux Developer

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Re: [gentoo-project] The problem of defunct and undermanned projects in Gentoo

[Aaron Bauman]

On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 1:34:52 PM EDT Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
> On 18/07/17 05:40 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
> > On wto, 2017-07-18 at 22:35 +0100, M. J. Everitt wrote:
> >> On 18/07/17 22:23, Kent Fredric wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 18 Jul 2017 22:12:45 +0100
> >>> 
> >>> "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@iee.org> wrote:
> >>>> I think mgorny was doing some general commit stats, and I have yet to
> >>>> compile my own, but it would be very interesting to see how many
> >>>> 'active' team members there were in any given project. I suspect the
> >>>> results could be very telling ...
> >>> 
> >>> Its not even like they're "inactive", they're just not active *in the
> >>> team*.
> >>> 
> >>> For some, there's no reason for them to devaway:
> >>> 
> >>> - They're on IRC
> >>> - They commit daily
> >>> 
> >>> But they're on teams they seldom do things in.
> >>> 
> >>> This is probably more true the more teams you're on.
> >> 
> >> Then why are you 'in' the team.. I mean, there's one thing to idle on an
> >> IRC channel, but membership does normally imply some form of
> >> contribution, no? Or is it just to make you 'look'
> >> interested/popular/part-of-the-furniture ....
> > 
> > Well, that *is* a problem. However, we are supposed to be friendly
> > and nice, and not tell other developers that they have done literally
> > nothing during the 2 years they're part of some project. That could
> > discourage them from contributing.
> 
> OK, so here's the flipside of this.  I'm a member of a few projects
> because I help take care of just a couple of things or maybe even just
> a gentoo-carried patch.  Being a project member is necessary as I do
> want to have the commit rights on the project, but I'm -not- nor ever
> meant to be a general project member or overall maintainer or dev.
> 
> So does that mean I should remove myself from these projects?  Or
> maybe do we just need some sort of 'occasional contributor' status to
> the project membership?  Or should things just stay as they are?

Developers receive commit rights across the tree once they pass their ebuild 
quiz and are onboarded.  The ability to make an "acceptable" commit is based 
upon your membership to a particular project.  If you do not feel you are a 
"general project member" then work with the particular project you are 
attempting to help.  I  *doubt* they will deny you the ability to commit on 
their behalf.  Let's not attempt to define yet another category of contribution 
in order to make people feel welcome.  

Work with people.

-Aaron