I'm commiting to reviewing and applying all patches that arrive on this list in the future. Keep them coming, they are appreciated.
Best, Andreas On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 10:37:43AM -0400, bill-auger wrote: > 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 -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ my GPG Public Key: https://files.grapentin.org/.gpg/public.key ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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