Hi,
If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even
vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole
Gentoo dev list to see.
If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the
possibility of including a new "post" in our developer base - the
package maintainer.
a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be
lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. This serves a couple
of purposes:
- Users might become more motivated to becoming a maintainer for
Gentoo, since it would require less time and effort from their end
- Might reduce the number of orphaned packages we have in the tree
b) Some existing developers might want to switch to this post, if they
feel that package maintenance is all they really want to do with
Gentoo. This has the advantage of requiring lesser time from their
side, while not feeling the pressure of being "responsible". We
already have arch-testers, so this will fit in nicely with our current
development model.
c) The actual developer post may be taken up by existing developers
who make wide-ranging or significant changes to Gentoo, as a whole.
Examples include: package manager development, eclasses,
documentation; basically anything that would require a GLEP or commit
access to the whole tree - you get the idea.
Some of you may argue that we already have proxy-maintainers. That's a
great idea, all I'm asking for is for us to formalize the position.
Giving a proxy-maintainer an official acknowledgement will definitely
attract more users to contribute. Meanwhile, developers can do
innovative things that they really like without having to maintain
packages just because of a formality. Giving package maintainers
commit access to parts of the tree might turn out to be tricky though,
this needs discussion with infra.
I'd really like for us to think through this proposal - I strongly
believe that this will improve the quality of Gentoo development as a
whole, and reduce the number of open bugs and their turnaround times.
Cheers,
Anant
P.S. As some of you may have already guessed, this proposal is based
on Debian's approval of a similar position in their developer
hierarchy last year: http://www.us.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003
P.P.S. Maybe this is more suited for -project, but everyone knows that
nobody reads that list :-p
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