Olivier Fisette wrote:
Familiarity with one or more scientific packages already in
Portage, and willfulness to maintain them up-to-date and
bug-free would be a plus. We currently have no maintainer for
important packages such as GNU Octave, Maxima or the Staden
Package. A problem I have with scientific software is that I
find it hard to test when it applies to a field I am not
familiar with. This is probably the case with everybody in the
sci herd. ;-)
Well ... I don't use Octave, but I am learning how to use Maxima.
Maintaining the Maxima ebuild, on the other hand, is mostly knowing how
to deal with the Common Lisp Controller and the four flavors of Lisp
that will execute Maxima (most of the time -- check some of the bugs
I've filed :). That's the stuff I don't know.
Since we have time constraints ourselves, we understand potential
recruits may only have a few hours during one day of the week to
do Gentoo development, and that is Ok. However, if you don't
think you will be able to dedicate at least an hour or two a
week on average, I am not sure it would be profitable to invest
time and efforts in the mentoring process.
I probably spend at least that much time *testing* open source software
a week. Let's say half of Saturday for a start. But I test a variety of
stuff, not just science packages. How big of a leap is it from being a
hard-core beta tester like myself to actually maintaining a package?
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