Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Hi, If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the possibility of including a new post in our developer base - the package maintainer. a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. This serves a couple of purposes: - Users might become more motivated to becoming a maintainer for Gentoo, since it would require less time and effort from their end - Might reduce the number of orphaned packages we have in the tree b) Some existing developers might want to switch to this post, if they feel that package maintenance is all they really want to do with Gentoo. This has the advantage of requiring lesser time from their side, while not feeling the pressure of being responsible. We already have arch-testers, so this will fit in nicely with our current development model. c) The actual developer post may be taken up by existing developers who make wide-ranging or significant changes to Gentoo, as a whole. Examples include: package manager development, eclasses, documentation; basically anything that would require a GLEP or commit access to the whole tree - you get the idea. Some of you may argue that we already have proxy-maintainers. That's a great idea, all I'm asking for is for us to formalize the position. Giving a proxy-maintainer an official acknowledgement will definitely attract more users to contribute. Meanwhile, developers can do innovative things that they really like without having to maintain packages just because of a formality. Giving package maintainers commit access to parts of the tree might turn out to be tricky though, this needs discussion with infra. I'd really like for us to think through this proposal - I strongly believe that this will improve the quality of Gentoo development as a whole, and reduce the number of open bugs and their turnaround times. Cheers, Anant P.S. As some of you may have already guessed, this proposal is based on Debian's approval of a similar position in their developer hierarchy last year: http://www.us.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003 P.P.S. Maybe this is more suited for -project, but everyone knows that nobody reads that list :-p -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
I totally second this proposal. I think this would be especially great for small or rarely used packages. I can think of at least a dozen packages that I'd love to see in Portage, but they are not in the tree. Allowing for people that are not developers to maintain easy or not crucial packages is a good thing. It would not require much effort for these people (since some packages are updated like once a year), and even if the ebuilds are of low quality, that would not be a big problem (we could mark those ebuilds specially so that if we developers have some time to spare, we can review them). The only problem I see, like Anant mentionned, is that we would need to restrict commit access to parts of the tree. Not sure if that is possible. Elvanör On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Anant Narayanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the possibility of including a new post in our developer base - the package maintainer. a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. This serves a couple of purposes: - Users might become more motivated to becoming a maintainer for Gentoo, since it would require less time and effort from their end - Might reduce the number of orphaned packages we have in the tree b) Some existing developers might want to switch to this post, if they feel that package maintenance is all they really want to do with Gentoo. This has the advantage of requiring lesser time from their side, while not feeling the pressure of being responsible. We already have arch-testers, so this will fit in nicely with our current development model. c) The actual developer post may be taken up by existing developers who make wide-ranging or significant changes to Gentoo, as a whole. Examples include: package manager development, eclasses, documentation; basically anything that would require a GLEP or commit access to the whole tree - you get the idea. Some of you may argue that we already have proxy-maintainers. That's a great idea, all I'm asking for is for us to formalize the position. Giving a proxy-maintainer an official acknowledgement will definitely attract more users to contribute. Meanwhile, developers can do innovative things that they really like without having to maintain packages just because of a formality. Giving package maintainers commit access to parts of the tree might turn out to be tricky though, this needs discussion with infra. I'd really like for us to think through this proposal - I strongly believe that this will improve the quality of Gentoo development as a whole, and reduce the number of open bugs and their turnaround times. Cheers, Anant P.S. As some of you may have already guessed, this proposal is based on Debian's approval of a similar position in their developer hierarchy last year: http://www.us.debian.org/vote/2007/vote_003 P.P.S. Maybe this is more suited for -project, but everyone knows that nobody reads that list :-p -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 22:41:58 +0530 Anant Narayanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, If you have something you'd wish for us to chat about, maybe even vote on, let us know ! Simply reply to this e-mail for the whole Gentoo dev list to see. If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the possibility of including a new post in our developer base - the package maintainer. a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On 22:41 Wed 05 Mar , Anant Narayanan wrote: If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the possibility of including a new post in our developer base - the package maintainer. ... I'd really like for us to think through this proposal - I strongly believe that this will improve the quality of Gentoo development as a whole, and reduce the number of open bugs and their turnaround times. Could you talk to some Debian people about how it's working out for them? (Or find a webpage that does this already.) I know they started it, but I'm not sure of the good and bad things that resulted. What I'm looking for is a list of potential costs benefits. One thing I do like about this idea is that it reintroduces more of a meritocracy. Thanks, Donnie -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? I haven't thought that through fully (in hopes of a few good suggestions!), but off the top of my head, maintainers don't need to complete the staff quiz. On the technical side, about the only thing they really require is a sound knowledge of bash, the do's and don'ts of ebuilds, and knowledge of how to use eclasses. Perhaps we can create a separate quiz for maintainers, which stresses on versioning, handling bump requests, keeping ebuilds clean etc, and nothing more. I'm willing to help form the quiz, but I certainly can't do it alone. As for the privileges, maintainers wouldn't need an email account, commit access to portions not concerning their package(s), voice on #gentoo-dev... Essentially, we need to keep limit the privileges to whatever infra can provide within reasonable limits - I expect the number of maintainers to be far greater than the developer count. On another note, we may introduce a rule that no package may be marked stable unless a full-fledged developer or QA member has approved it (along with the usual arch-tester stamp). This might help in ensuring the quality of our stable tree. -- Anant -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius Perhaps there could be some honor code system at least, where the package maintainer would be restricted to their area of maintainership. This is the current situation. Regards, Petteri signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:41:32 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius Perhaps there could be some honor code system at least, where the package maintainer would be restricted to their area of maintainership. This is the current situation. Regards, Petteri Exactly, only the package maintainers wouldn't have everything that a full dev would have... signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Thomas Anderson wrote: On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:41:32 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius Perhaps there could be some honor code system at least, where the package maintainer would be restricted to their area of maintainership. This is the current situation. Regards, Petteri Exactly, only the package maintainers wouldn't have everything that a full dev would have... What exactly wouldn't they get? What would differ them from Arch Testers? -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Anant Narayanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some of you may argue that we already have proxy-maintainers. That's a great idea, all I'm asking for is for us to formalize the position. Giving a proxy-maintainer an official acknowledgement will definitely attract more users to contribute. IMO the problem with proxy-maintainers is that most users don't know such a thing exists. I bet some users could proxy-maintain a lot of orphaned packages if we potentiate proxy-maint. -- Santiago M. Mola Jabber ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:59:55 Doug Goldstein wrote: Thomas Anderson wrote: On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:41:32 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius Perhaps there could be some honor code system at least, where the package maintainer would be restricted to their area of maintainership. This is the current situation. Regards, Petteri Exactly, only the package maintainers wouldn't have everything that a full dev would have... What exactly wouldn't they get? What would differ them from Arch Testers? Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. -- Taylor and Anderson, Metropolitan prosecutors. Commit a crime? See you in court signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:59:55 Doug Goldstein wrote: Thomas Anderson wrote: On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:41:32 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius Perhaps there could be some honor code system at least, where the package maintainer would be restricted to their area of maintainership. This is the current situation. Regards, Petteri Exactly, only the package maintainers wouldn't have everything that a full dev would have... What exactly wouldn't they get? What would differ them from Arch Testers? Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. How would you ensure ebuild quality for these package maintainers? Regards, Petteri signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Thomas Anderson wrote: On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:59:55 Doug Goldstein wrote: Thomas Anderson wrote: On Wednesday 05 March 2008 14:41:32 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Please elaborate on how a full.fledged developer would differ from a package maintainer technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced? Marius Perhaps there could be some honor code system at least, where the package maintainer would be restricted to their area of maintainership. This is the current situation. Regards, Petteri Exactly, only the package maintainers wouldn't have everything that a full dev would have... What exactly wouldn't they get? What would differ them from Arch Testers? Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. So what you're looking for is committer ACLs. Gentoo's CVS currently does not use any form of ACLs to restrict access. This proposal would have to be discussed with the infra team to consider the feasibility to add ACLs to the tree. -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-dev] Proposal for (next year's probably) SoC
I think it could be useful to learn from other projects' handling of SoC. The FFmpeg project has a list of qualification tasks for the students to complete before they can accepted into SoC, as you can see From [1]. The tasks are minor tasks that don't require a lot of time at hand, but gives a good way to judge if the person is in for the experience or the money, and might be able to cut the deal even for Gentoo devs if that is really wanted. How to implement it for Gentoo? Well I think we have the tool already: Bugzilla. We just need to add a keyword SOC_QUALIFICATION_TASK; when a developer think of a working qualification task, he can add the keyword and CC the soc team or something like that. Then the users can deal with the problems whenever they want, for the next SoC, even during the year. When they submit their application, we ask users to put the link to the bug that represented the qualification task they completed. To make the checking more easy, we could make sure that the person who completed the task is listed in the Whiteboard, and that only Gentoo devs can change that for the bugs for qualification task (letting only devs opening them, or cloning the feature requests from user that become a SoC qualification task, for instance). Then get a tracker that is blocked by all the SoC qualification task bugs, monitored by the SoC team, that can make sure how stuff is going with the qualification tasks, and finally add a default query for the tasks to the documentation about SoC. I'm sure we can easily get some qualification tasks on; with a bit more work we might also get qualification points (so that for instance minor tasks alone can't cut the deal). Maybe a bit complex, but I think it might be worth discussing. [1] http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2008 -- Diego Flameeyes Pettenò http://blog.flameeyes.eu/ pgplbNnqPp88m.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wednesday 05 March 2008 16:05:09 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. How would you ensure ebuild quality for these package maintainers? Regards, Petteri Maybe a small review board of 3-4 people to make sure that all new packages meet the requirements in the devmanual? Just an idea, maybe not the best. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Anant Narayanan wrote: [stuff] So basically, what you're looking for is something like Arch Linux's Trusted User (TU) concept[1]. That works for Arch, because they have 5 repositories (including a community repo), but I'm not sure how well that would fit Gentoo, where there's just one. We'd need some pretty extensive ACLs to make your proposal work, so you'd need to talk to infra about that. [1] http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Trusted_User_Guidelines signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: On Wednesday 05 March 2008 16:05:09 Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. How would you ensure ebuild quality for these package maintainers? Regards, Petteri Maybe a small review board of 3-4 people to make sure that all new packages meet the requirements in the devmanual? Just an idea, maybe not the best. I don't think this would be an improvement over proxy maintenance. Regards, Petteri signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 04:07:48PM -0500, Doug Goldstein wrote: Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. So what you're looking for is committer ACLs. Gentoo's CVS currently does not use any form of ACLs to restrict access. This proposal would have to be discussed with the infra team to consider the feasibility to add ACLs to the tree. As the CVS admin, I've considered them for a while, esp to help with some of the access to parts of docs. The BSDs make very heavy use of them successfully (and indeed wrote several of the CVS ACL systems). But just on the having time side, I'd ask for a month or two to fully implement them. I've got enough projects in progress right now without adding another. -- Robin Hugh Johnson Gentoo Linux Developer Infra Guy E-Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85 pgpoJvuGauCnc.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal for (next year's probably) SoC
On Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:07:37 +0100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò) wrote: The tasks are minor tasks that don't require a lot of time at hand, but gives a good way to judge if the person is in for the experience or the money, and might be able to cut the deal even for Gentoo devs if that is really wanted. How to implement it for Gentoo? Well I think we have the tool already: Bugzilla. We just need to add a keyword SOC_QUALIFICATION_TASK; when a developer think of a working qualification task, he can add the keyword and CC the soc team or something like that. While the concept itself is a good one, I think that such qualification tasks have to be related to the proposed project to be of real use. With a single codebase and a single implementation language like ffmpeg a single list of tests can work, but Gentoo has many aspects that require completely different skills. For us a generic list of tasks you may help in testing the motivation, but it hardly helps to assess the technical skills of a student to complete e.g. a webapp project if he fixes some ebuilds or writes a patch for a random package. I think we should just require students to list some references related to their project in their application and have the relevant mentors check those. If a student can't find some references on his own he can the soc team/mentors/devs for something. In fact I think what is needed most is improved communications instead of random tests. Marius -- Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On 06-Mar-08, at 2:35 AM, Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. How would you ensure ebuild quality for these package maintainers? Maintainers will also go through a recruitment process, although a much shorter one which focusses only on ebuild maintenance - maintainers will not have the karma to introduce new ebuilds into the tree. The idea is to make the recruitment process as easy and quick as possible, while ensuring that the person involved has the requisite skills. Also, packages may not be marked stable until a full-fledged-developer/ QA-member has approved of it. Packages being broken in the testing tree are not uncommon, and we are usually notified quickly enough to fix it. -- Anant-- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On 3/5/08, Anant Narayanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 06-Mar-08, at 2:35 AM, Petteri Räty wrote: Thomas Anderson kirjoitti: Arch Testers don't have tree access. This proposal gives the package maintainer the ability to commit their changes. How would you ensure ebuild quality for these package maintainers? Maintainers will also go through a recruitment process, although a much shorter one which focusses only on ebuild maintenance - maintainers will not have the karma to introduce new ebuilds into the tree. The idea is to make the recruitment process as easy and quick as possible, while ensuring that the person involved has the requisite skills. Maybe break this down for me again please: What are the technical differences between a 'Package Maintainer' and a 'Developer'? I guess technical is the wrong word. Lets back up. What problem are you trying to solve? In your original mail; you stated that: a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. This serves a couple of purposes: - Users might become more motivated to becoming a maintainer for Gentoo, since it would require less time and effort from their end - Might reduce the number of orphaned packages we have in the tree So your goals are: Have more maintained packages in the tree. Get more people (users) involved in making Gentoo better. And you want to accomplish this by: Creating a position that has less stringent requirements to encourage interested folks to contribute. Your point B) also mentions removing pressure from existing developers by having some move to this new position to be less 'reponsible'. Can you explain how this 'Package Maintainer' is 'less responsible' than a full fledged developer? Can you also explain in more detail how the position of 'Package Maintainer' is also easier to obtain than the position of 'Developer'? You also stated: Meanwhile, developers can do innovative things that they really like without having to maintain packages just because of a formality. I'm a bit new here; but since when was it required for a developer to maintain any packages? I care a lot less about how to implement this idea technically (cvs acls or lack of Gentoo.org e-mail address) and more so on what this will actually gain us; and how we should go about designing this position to accomplish the goals I think you want it to accomplish. Also, packages may not be marked stable until a full-fledged-developer/ QA-member has approved of it. Packages being broken in the testing tree are not uncommon, and we are usually notified quickly enough to fix it. -- Anant-- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for March
On Wednesday 05 March 2008 17:11:58 Anant Narayanan wrote: If it's not too late for this month's meeting, I'd like to discuss the possibility of including a new post in our developer base - the package maintainer. a) The requirements to become a package maintainer for Gentoo may be lesser than that of the full-fledged developer. This serves a couple of purposes: - Users might become more motivated to becoming a maintainer for Gentoo, since it would require less time and effort from their end - Might reduce the number of orphaned packages we have in the tree Adding user repos to layman isn't good enough? Plus, there's always sunrise. Thanks Roy -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
