Duncan wrote:
But no matter, the practical fact of the matter is that for someone who would otherwise not do IRC, it's just one more hurdle in the process. Whether it's useful or not, trivial or vital, no longer matters, it's defined by the gatekeepers as a requirement, therefore, by said definition, it is a requirement.
If an otherwise-capable candidate developer is stuck in some backwater where the only ISP in the country has a 14-layer impenetrable protocol filter on IRC I'm sure their mentor will bend over backwards to work with them. However, this is becoming more of an argument over points of rhetoric than anything with a practical impact. If somebody is qualified to author gentoo documentation or write ebuilds they're going to be able to figure out how to use /query or /msg in any of 47 irc clients.
If somebody has some kind of physical/mental handicap that would prevent realtime communications but not otherwise interfere with contributions I'm sure a mentor would also be happy to try to work with that. However, it is important that mentors have an opportunity to get to know a candidate - they are responsible for their actions and you can't build trust by only sending a few emails back and forth. Ultimately that is the goal - Gentoo is a community and those who want to be devs do need to be able to interact in at least a fairly nominal way with the community at large.
Gentoo has MANY things that could stand some change/improvement. An over-dependence on IRC could arguably be said to be one of them. However, completely avoiding an effective realtime communications technology simply for the sake of doing so seems a bit over the top.
