Re: [gentoo-dev] Making the developer community more open

[George Prowse]

On 20/03/06, Ciaran McCreesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:07:37 +0000 Daniel Drake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
| One of the bigger problems is that we have a huge user community who
| are keen on contributing, but we have such a high barrier for entry
| to the developer community. Quite rightly so - we're dealing with a
| live tree, so we can't give out commit access on the street.

A relatively easy way of lowering that barrier would be to provide
good, up to date, example-oriented ebuild writing documentation.
There's too much stuff that people need to know to write ebuilds that's
not written down anywhere -- this not only makes it harder for users to
write good ebuilds, but also leads to some of them being dissuaded when
they're told that the only way to know what's policy is by having paid
attention on the mailing lists for the past five years.

Bridge the gap between the developers and the users and you have a user community that has a better knowlege of the distro and it's working and you have a developeer community more in touch with it's users. Most people would love to help but knowing where to start is the greatest challenge, make it easy for them to know how to be a developer and then they can decide if they have something to contribute. As Ciaran said, up-to-date ebuild documentation is a must but it needs a bit of "the idiots guide to ebuilds" style to it. Also a big assumption is made that people know how to use CVS and other systems.

"Book them and they will come..."

George