On Monday 22 August 2005 00:15, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > >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?
As Olivier said at least a few hours a week to dedicate to Gentoo would be enough, and it sounds as if you already do that. I myself do work in the scientific herd (mentored by Olivier) which was the herd I originally joined with, the AMD64 porting team, the KDE herd and the net-proxy herd. These are just the packages I tend to use a lot, or the areas I work in. Some I just maintain because I am a nice guy and find it interesting using new packages :) The leap isn't too great from building betas, being involved upstream and keeping up with releases/bug hunting to becoming a developer. You need a good background in bash scripting, ebuild writing and the tools used to author ebuilds. You also need to prove a certain level of knowledge before you become a full developer - please take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml and http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/devmanual/ for further details :) I remember reading some of your bugs, and working through some R stuff with you previously. You don't have to limit yourself to just scientific applications if you become a developer. One thing I hope to improve is communication with users and potential developers for the scientific herd. It would be nice to see a little more activity on the mailing lists and IRC! Freenode, #gentoo-science - there aren't many of us on there but we do idle on that channel amongst others. Hope that answers a few of your questions - and if I got anything wrong I am sure some of the other developers will correct me ;) Sincerely, Marcus -- Gentoo Linux Developer Scientific Applications | AMD64 | KDE | net-proxy
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