There are some QA/CI tools out there that have substantially improved
the quality of the distro, and most of them have started out as one
dev just creating a tinderbox or whatever and filing bugs when they
see problems. The only real downside to this is if somebody quits we
might lose these tools - but there are efforts to host them on infra
once we start to treat them as part of the core experience. When they
start out they're just one dev's random contributions and they may or
may not persist.
Speaking of tinderboxes:
Is there any kind of QA tool that normal end users can contribute CPU cycles to? Given the massive combinatorial explosion of package configurations that can be installed using Gentoo, one might imagine that there's some value in simply installing programs with different USE combinations and running the self-tests for those programs.
What I don't want to do is anything manual. Be it filing bugs, or testing things.
But I'd be happy to run some arbitrary QA tool in a virtual machine or chroot nearly indefinitely.