We seem to be heading towards a situation where the x86 arch team do all marking of stuff stable on x86. This I like. Some observations - these may be phrased in the affirmative but please take them as observations/suggestions :)
1) The x86 arch team will need to be large(ish) to keep pace. Herds could nominate one of their members to join the team; that'd get a fair amount of tree coverage quickly. 2) The job of the x86 arch team members should be to arrange, collect and collate testing results, not to do the actual testing themselves. Note this means being a member of the x86 arch team is a management role rather than a development or test role. 3) All packages need to be assigned an x86 arch team member responsible. I'd suggest not putting _any_ rules about timeliness in tihs case - if people want a package to go stable more quickly, then they need to do somthing about it; either become an x86 arch team member (in the case of a Dev who wants control) or do some arch testing (in the case of a user, or a dev who just wants up push things along). 4) It'll need a pool of arch testers - this is a great opportunity to include some regular users directly in Gentoo. Some kind of recognition system needs to be in place - I'm thinking of peer qudos type stuff, for example listing arch testers responsible for a package being marked stable against that package somewhere; perhaps the online package database, or perhaps on a credits page on the main web site. We shouldn't underestimate the value of testing work - it may not be as technically involved as actual dev work, but it's a big (boring!) job with high value if done right. 5) Releng's job will be a lot easier as stable x86 will become much more stable... 6) I notice the amd64 team requre their arch testers to take the ebuild quiz; I think this is a bit harsh, as arch testers are regular users without commit access to CVS etc. A simpler quiz targetted at ensuring the arch testers know what is expected of them would lower the bar and should encourage more users to join in. Using the ebuild quiz means you get people who quickly become devs in their own right... 7) (6) aside, take as many cues as possible from the amd64 team who've been at this for a while! Kev. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
