Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
On Monday 22 August 2005 08:48, C Y wrote:
Perhaps we could have a "support team" behind someone with official
Gentoo developer status - people could point out significant ebuilds
with most logic in place to the developer, help work out quirks in the
programs/ebuilds, and generally speed things up? Certainly the
developer would bear final responsibility but this way those of us with
five hours every month or so could help out too, particularly for
specialty packages. (BTY, if some genius could figure out brl-cad I
would be grateful - it's going to take me a year at this point :-/.)
I was wondering myself if some people in here might be receptive to the idea
of a support team, much like the arch testers we have for the amd64 porting
team. It often leads on to people becoming devs, but is a great way to help
out when you can.
Yeah, it's a good idea -- my tastes are widely varying, though,
including science and computer music, Ruby on Rails, and just learning
in general. For myself, I'm probably closer to knowing what's "under the
hood" in R than any other package; I've been using it since 1.1 or
thereabouts. In the case of R, I beta test the upstream tarballs
whenever I have the spare time. But the R ebuild itself isn't
particularly tricky, nor is there a lot of work maintaining portability
of it across the Gentoo-supported architectures. Their issues are the
same as those of most open-source packages -- x86-64 and GCC 4. :)
In the end, we're all volunteers anyhow in this game. We do what we can
when we can, as long as it's legal and ethical. So I'm going to keep
spending at least four hours a week doing exactly what I'm doing now,
whether or not I get some kind of "formal" status or "recognition" --
just the learning and having the quality software available when I need
it is enough!
Tony Murray is filling that kind of role unofficially with all the work he
puts into the boinc and setiathome ebuilds, whilst I review, test, improve
and commit them once they are up to standard. I also have good contact with
the quickplot developer who has integrated my patches upstream and helped
significantly with the ebuilds for that package.
I think these relationships are important, and I personally nurture them as
much as possible. Many scientific packages are very involved and having
people help test and work out problems can significantly increase our
efficiency as a team.
It's also important to have lines of communication/liasons with the
upstream package developers. Since most of Gentoo is built from source,
it could take as little as a few hours for an upstream release to make
it into Portage unstable/testing and onto a Gentoo user's system. Good
news and bad news can travel at the same speed. :) In my case, I've been
the "user" in the development chain of TeXmacs and Common Music. There's
no way on Earth I could have done that in Fedora or even Debian.
(Actually, in the case of TeXmacs, I did try to file a bug in Debian on
the TeXmacs/R bug I found, but never did figure out their bug filing
system. And those folks at TeXmacs never *have* fixed the bug, either! :( )
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.borasky-research.net/
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
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