Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo dead?

[Kent Fredric <kentnl@gentoo.org>]

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On Tue, 21 Apr 2020 19:58:03 +0300
Consus <consus@ftml.net> wrote:

> Github bot warns
> you that contributing new packages to the main repo is low priority and
> probably no one will help you,

Maybe that's a misinterpretation.

Gentoo workflow isn't oriented around Pull requests, Pull requests are
generally a mechanism used to allow users and other non-developers to
"assist".

People who are dev's generally don't use PR's for their work, although
there are a few exceptions to this because the PR facility allows for
various "pre-testing" and "I'm not the guy in charge of this, so I
better let the guy who is look at it first" situations.

And somewhat as a result, contributions via the PR mechanism *are* low
priority. Not because nobody is around to do it, but because either we
have more important things to do, *or*, sometimes there are things we
must do *before* handling PR's.

Sometimes even people filing bugs for "please update this" serves no
purpose, because we're probably already aware there's an update, its
just a matter of time constraints and priorities.

I would argue we're actually more on top of, and aware of, things that
need to be done than users might imagine. Its just largely invisible
because you have to go *looking* for it, and you have to actually
communicate with dev's to really see what's going on, because
sometimes, its all in their head.

Just the perception from a portage consumption point *may* look like a
thing is stagnated "because no recent changes".

If you were to look at portage, you might think no work is happening on
the rust front, beyond the language itself being there.

But lots of research and experimental work is happening on overlays,
working out how to do a thing right, before burdening users with it.

( And there's also the fact that properly reviewing a PR often requires
the same work investment to merely verify it, as if you were to do the
work yourself without a PR, which serves as a bit of a disincentive to
care about PRs )

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