yea its mostly that - its just unfortunate that there are not more people offering their time to support GNU and fully free distros - all of the FSDG distros have small teams - most of them are operated completely on a labor-of-love basis, and either the community is not giving back as much love as they could, or the community is too small to support even the small number of fully free distros that we have - also, most of them are LTS distros; and perhaps the need for community contributions is not as evident, or even present - a fully rolling distro like parabola requires much more love, to insulate it from the harsh realities of IRL, which cause the human resources available at any given time, to fluctuate unpredictably; as it will for any project without the funding to keep people wearing their volunteer hats all day
that fluctuation has swung low recently; but it could pick up again at any time - contributions, especially complete working PKGBUILDs, do remove some of the burden of package maintenance; but they need time to squeeze through the bottle-neck that is the total maintenance workload itself - in addition to packaging, there is server maintenance, installers and releases, user support, bug triage, and bug fixing - people may consider keeping their favorite packages on the bleeding-edge to be high-priority; but over-all, most packaging tasks, even the ones that block upgrades, are a relatively lower-priority task, compared to the critical essentials - that is really no different than what LTS distros do BTW of course, the bleeding-edge is what characterizes a rolling distro; but if the server is not serving, or the installers dont install, or there are bugs that dont get fixed, or users can not get help, then there really is no distro at all - of course, community relations and filling packaging requests are important; but during times when we need to prioritize, those are the things which can be deferred with the least grief for the most people - again, things could pick up at any time; but that is the situation we are in this month ovruni is currently the only one dedicated to upgrading packages, megver keeps on top the kernels, and freemor is giving time to user support and bug triaging - that just enough to keep the packages healthy; but of course there is always more that could be done, even in the best of times - currently, i am the only one who is putting a large number of hours per week into parabola; so anything else that i de-prioritize, will tend to languish somewhat, until we replenish the lull in volunteer/hours for the past few weeks, i have been intentionally ignoring the bug tracker and mailing list, in order to focus on the high-priority tasks, such as the server and releases - it was a good time to do that, because oaken-source and i had just done a sprint to get the essential bugs fixed and packages up to date - it does not take long for a rolling distro to accumulate new problems and new maintenance chores though everything posted to the mailing lists (including the spam) and bug tracker is sent to my email inbox; and i will address them eventually - rest assured, that nothing goes un-noticed - for example, when i get the time to upgrade iceweasel, and if no one else gets to it before me, i will definitely consult grizzlyuser's PKGBUILDs - its just a matter of when that one package will rise to the top of someone's priorities as for on-boarding of contributors and timely acknowledgements of contributions, a community liaison would help a lot - two people volunteered to do that last year, and they are the ones who convinced me to open a community web forum; but so far, neither of them has given parabola much of their time - in other words, rather than feeling unappreciated because of lack of acknowledgement, please do take it upon yourself to be the one who monitors contributions and pesters us about the highest-priority ones - it is unfortunate if ever we miss opportunities to on-board new contributors - its one of those chicken-and-egg deals - the projects that have the spare time to on-board new contributors, are the ones that need help the least, and vice-versa i have suggested that it may be good to open up the [*-testing] repos to a few heavy contributors, something like arch's "trusted users" - that would at least allow PKGBUILDs to be built and available for testing by anyone brave enough to enable the testing repos - im not sure how much it would be used though; or if the other parabola devs would concur; and again that new contributor system itself entails some extra work for me - ive actually done most of it already; but again, at the expense of other things of could have done - that could help a few popular packages to roll more freely; but what we really need is for a few people to dedicate a significant number of hours to parabola - if all of the current devs on the parabola roster could give parabola 4-8 per week, or if even one other person could put in as many hours as i have been, that would be enough to free any bottlen-necks, without any re-structuring _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
