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.
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.
There are a fair number of at least partial ebuilds for useful
scientific software stuck in bugzilla - brl-cad and acl2 come
immediately to mind, and I know there are others. Plus a fair number
that don't have ebuilds where it would be useful to have them. Gentoo
is alreay one of the best for scientific software, due to compiling
things being easy and our ebuild pool, but we could definitely do
better.
The problem comes down to manpower and a need to recruit some more people to
the team. Having a support team similar to the arch testers could certainly
help in our case if those people were not ready to become devs/didn't have
the time. Once a package has been committed they would also need to help with
version bumps and fixing bugs with the new packages ideally.
My machine is probably a poor test machine - what gentoo environment
would we need to maintain?
Just an up to date Gentoo install is fine. If you are testing some more
experimental stuff (I test new baselayout, glibc, gcc and other core stuff
sometimes) then a chroot might also be adviseable. Scientific apps just
require an up to date system.
Thanks,
Marcus
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