[gentoo-dev] (nessun oggetto)
-- Antonio Quartulli
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
Markos Chandras wrote: Even a volunteer-driven organization needs some standard rules in order to survive. From time to time this volunteer moto is what some people consider as anarchy As far as survival goes - I think the rumors of Gentoo's death are greatly exaggerated. I certainly agree that we need standards, but as far as I can tell those exist. I'm not exactly sure what the actual problem is. What resolvable issue is directly impacting the Gentoo community, and how would things actually be better if that issue didn't exist? What is the itch that needs scratching? I don't see developers putting QA violations into the portage tree left and right. For the most part I'd say the level of abuse in bugzilla is down and continues to trend down. Sure, manpower is limited, but the solution to that isn't to tell the people who are here to work harder or quit (which means quit) but instead to recruit more help. Arch teams seem to be generally doing a good job keeping up with STABLEREQs on the major archs - if you use a minor arch that isn't as well supported I'm sure we'd be happy to have more help. Is the issue anarchy, or the bazaar model in general? You can't always have it both ways...
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 16:50:47 Richard Freeman wrote: Markos Chandras wrote: Even a volunteer-driven organization needs some standard rules in order to survive. From time to time this volunteer moto is what some people consider as anarchy As far as survival goes - I think the rumors of Gentoo's death are greatly exaggerated. I certainly agree that we need standards, but as far as I can tell those exist. I don't see developers putting QA violations into the portage tree left and right. For the most part I'd say the level of abuse in bugzilla is down and continues to trend down. Sure, manpower is limited, but the solution to that isn't to tell the people who are here to work harder or quit (which means quit) but instead to recruit more help. When,how,and who is going to write down a list of possible recruitment hunting actions? There is too much chit-chatting around but nobody ( including me of course) is daring to propose actual solutions and proposals Arch teams seem to be generally doing a good job keeping up with STABLEREQs on the major archs - if you use a minor arch that isn't as well supported I'm sure we'd be happy to have more help. Arch teams, according to their project pages, are in a good shape. Major arches have enough people ( assuming that the project pages are up2date ) -- Markos Chandras (hwoarang) Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Qt/Sunrise/Sound] Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
Hi! On Tue, 05 May 2009, Markos Chandras wrote: Arch teams, according to their project pages, are in a good shape. Major arches have enough people ( assuming that the project pages are up2date ) If I keel over and armin76 is stuck in work/'versity, the alpha dev count is 0. Not exactly good, but we manage. I'm in the process of recruiting an archtester and he may become a dev one day. That said, more feedback from /users/ regarding alpha would be appreciated, but I doubt -dev@ is the best place to look for it ;) Regards, Tobias (aka Blackb|rd on IRC) -- panic(smp_callin() a\n); linux-2.6.6/arch/parisc/kernel/smp.c
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:06:43PM +0300, Markos Chandras wrote: On Tuesday 05 May 2009 16:50:47 Richard Freeman wrote: Arch teams seem to be generally doing a good job keeping up with STABLEREQs on the major archs - if you use a minor arch that isn't as well supported I'm sure we'd be happy to have more help. Arch teams, according to their project pages, are in a good shape. Major arches have enough people ( assuming that the project pages are up2date ) The amd64 project page at least is definitely not. We have a ton of slackers. I'd venture to say most in the project don't actively work on amd64 at all. We are handling the load fairly well though. Thomas -- - Thomas Anderson Gentoo Developer / Areas of responsibility: AMD64, Secretary to the Gentoo Council - pgp7QZdeBowcq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
Could be a good idea publish a status of each Gentoo project and see what is needed, so the users/devs can offer some help. -- Sergio D. Rodríguez Inclan - http://srinclan.wordpress.com Linux User #446728 -- http://counter.li.org/ --
[gentoo-dev] Re: Retiring
Sergio D. Rodríguez Inclan srinc...@gmail.com posted f01ff58b0905050926o74ddf373l85a1c49a6a32...@mail.gmail.com, excerpted below, on Tue, 05 May 2009 12:26:23 -0400: Could be a good idea publish a status of each Gentoo project and see what is needed, so the users/devs can offer some help. Actually, the various project leads do tend to do this once or twice a year, with most projects following the leader after someone starts it, posting status to the dev list, at least. It /is/ about time for another round I think, but I hope whoever decides to start it starts it as a new thread, not attached to this one. So project leads? Who wants to be first? =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 19:26:23 Sergio D. Rodríguez Inclan wrote: Could be a good idea publish a status of each Gentoo project and see what is needed, so the users/devs can offer some help. Publish where? Blogs? mailing list? Forums? we dont have a centralized way to inform users about such issues so the publishing should be done in multiple places *planet *universe *forum *mailing list *... It is not that handy, is it? Some one could say Post it on gentoo.org homepage. I wonder if users ever visit that page to read gentoo news :\ -- Markos Chandras (hwoarang) Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Qt/Sunrise/Sound] Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
Markos Chandras wrote: Some one could say Post it on gentoo.org homepage. I wonder if users ever visit that page to read gentoo news :\ I can safely say that some never do... RobbieAB
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
Markos Chandras wrote: On Tuesday 05 May 2009 19:26:00 Thomas Anderson wrote: On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:06:43PM +0300, Markos Chandras wrote: On Tuesday 05 May 2009 16:50:47 Richard Freeman wrote: Arch teams seem to be generally doing a good job keeping up with STABLEREQs on the major archs - if you use a minor arch that isn't as well supported I'm sure we'd be happy to have more help. Arch teams, according to their project pages, are in a good shape. Major arches have enough people ( assuming that the project pages are up2date ) The amd64 project page at least is definitely not. We have a ton of slackers. I'd venture to say most in the project don't actively work on amd64 at all. We are handling the load fairly well though. Thomas /me is listing all the reported issues Really? I was thinking about joining amd64 project but when I visited the project page , I saw like 25 people listed as developers. So I thought that Woow,there are plenty of dudes here, so there is no urgent need for new developers right now This is a major issue as well. If the project pages are way out of date, how do we expect people to understand our real needs on manpower etc. Cleaning and updating the project pages once a while is not that difficult. It takes about 15' ( and a couple of e-mails to inform the slackers ). If we really (?) want to run a recruitment campaign, our web presence but be quite active and responsible. Is all this help needed stuff that ordinary users can help out with? If so dont people go and ask for help in the forums?
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
Markos Chandras wrote: On Tuesday 05 May 2009 19:26:23 Sergio D. Rodríguez Inclan wrote: Could be a good idea publish a status of each Gentoo project and see what is needed, so the users/devs can offer some help. [snip] Some one could say Post it on gentoo.org homepage. I wonder if users ever visit that page to read gentoo news :\ There is already such a place [1] but I think not so much people knows about it. [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/staffing-needs/ Mounir
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 19:52:34 George Prowse wrote: Is all this help needed stuff that ordinary users can help out with? If so dont people go and ask for help in the forums? I assume that this recruitment process does not address to every single gentoo user but to those who actually have technical knowledge and time to spare for their beloved distro :P. We have plenty of them on forums.gentoo.org ( and not only ) -- Markos Chandras (hwoarang) Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Qt/Sunrise/Sound] Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 20:03:58 Mounir Lamouri wrote: Markos Chandras wrote: On Tuesday 05 May 2009 19:26:23 Sergio D. Rodríguez Inclan wrote: Could be a good idea publish a status of each Gentoo project and see what is needed, so the users/devs can offer some help. [snip] Some one could say Post it on gentoo.org homepage. I wonder if users ever visit that page to read gentoo news :\ There is already such a place [1] but I think not so much people knows about it. [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/staffing-needs/ Mounir Indeed there is. But I think that neither users nor developers are really using it -- Markos Chandras (hwoarang) Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Qt/Sunrise/Sound] Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
George Prowse schrieb: Thomas Sachau wrote: For those, who can work with IRC and are interested in working with ebuilds, there is already an option: Join #gentoo-dev-help or even better #gentoo-sunrise and read the documentation from the topic. The Sunrise Overlay (with the #gentoo-sunrise IRC channel) is open for everyone willing to learn and contribute to it. Even normal users can get access, learn how to create ebuilds, how to improve them and how to maintain them. As a starting point, this is a central overlay, where ebuilds are maintained, that dont get a developer as maintainer because of missing manpower. Additionally, all contributors learn the ebuild development work themselves. And if you are willing to learn and do continuously good work, there is a good chance that you may level up to a developer yourself someday. You want an example? This was my way to become a full Gentoo developer. ;-) So at least for ebuild maintainence, there are good starting points (probably other projects also have training grounds like the java or kde herds), the bigger problem may be the communication between potential new developers and the current developer base and our options to become a new developer. I think you are missing the point. If you sit and wait for them to join you will always be understaffed. Go on a big dev drive! Announce it all over all the Gentoo's normal communication channels and other generic linux places! Email some linux magazines, talk to distrowatch, message some large LUGs. Get people talking about it. Whatever happens, dont just sit on your hands. Tell the users that Gentoo needs them and that they can make a difference! If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly with a sufficient number of current developers who are willing to walk people through how and what it means to be a Gentoo Developer then the influx could create a new backbone of new developers who will hopefully be here for years to come. Such a campaign would need quite some time and i dont have this free time. So if anyone is willing to do the needed work, i can try to help a bit, but cannot take the work and time myself. The only thing i can do and currently do whenever possible is pointing people to the sunrise project and helping them there. And thats what i did with my mail. -- Thomas Sachau Gentoo Linux Developer signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
Thomas Sachau wrote: George Prowse schrieb: Thomas Sachau wrote: For those, who can work with IRC and are interested in working with ebuilds, there is already an option: Join #gentoo-dev-help or even better #gentoo-sunrise and read the documentation from the topic. The Sunrise Overlay (with the #gentoo-sunrise IRC channel) is open for everyone willing to learn and contribute to it. Even normal users can get access, learn how to create ebuilds, how to improve them and how to maintain them. As a starting point, this is a central overlay, where ebuilds are maintained, that dont get a developer as maintainer because of missing manpower. Additionally, all contributors learn the ebuild development work themselves. And if you are willing to learn and do continuously good work, there is a good chance that you may level up to a developer yourself someday. You want an example? This was my way to become a full Gentoo developer. ;-) So at least for ebuild maintainence, there are good starting points (probably other projects also have training grounds like the java or kde herds), the bigger problem may be the communication between potential new developers and the current developer base and our options to become a new developer. I think you are missing the point. If you sit and wait for them to join you will always be understaffed. Go on a big dev drive! Announce it all over all the Gentoo's normal communication channels and other generic linux places! Email some linux magazines, talk to distrowatch, message some large LUGs. Get people talking about it. Whatever happens, dont just sit on your hands. Tell the users that Gentoo needs them and that they can make a difference! If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly with a sufficient number of current developers who are willing to walk people through how and what it means to be a Gentoo Developer then the influx could create a new backbone of new developers who will hopefully be here for years to come. Such a campaign would need quite some time and i dont have this free time. So if anyone is willing to do the needed work, i can try to help a bit, but cannot take the work and time myself. The only thing i can do and currently do whenever possible is pointing people to the sunrise project and helping them there. And thats what i did with my mail. I also fear that any sustained campaign would be bogged down in Gentoo's red tape.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
On Mon, 04 May 2009 21:47:08 +0100 George Prowse george.pro...@gmail.com wrote: If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly with a sufficient number of current developers who are willing to walk people through how and what it means to be a Gentoo Developer then the influx could create a new backbone of new developers who will hopefully be here for years to come. That's not how it works -- we know this from last time Gentoo recruited a whole load of people without verifying their abilities. With lots of new developers, what little time skilled developers already have ends up being spent fixing all the screwups made by people who were only recruited to make up numbers. Gentoo needs better developers, not more developers. -- Ciaran McCreesh signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Mon, 04 May 2009 21:47:08 +0100 George Prowse george.pro...@gmail.com wrote: If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly with a sufficient number of current developers who are willing to walk people through how and what it means to be a Gentoo Developer then the influx could create a new backbone of new developers who will hopefully be here for years to come. That's not how it works -- we know this from last time Gentoo recruited a whole load of people without verifying their abilities. With lots of new developers, what little time skilled developers already have ends up being spent fixing all the screwups made by people who were only recruited to make up numbers. Gentoo needs better developers, not more developers. And where did i say their abilities wouldn't be verified? Come on now, you'll have to do better than that. In terms of figures a conservative estimate would be 25% wouldn't have the necessary skills and another 25% would be unsuitable.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
On Tue, 05 May 2009 19:11:02 +0100 George Prowse george.pro...@gmail.com wrote: That's not how it works -- we know this from last time Gentoo recruited a whole load of people without verifying their abilities. With lots of new developers, what little time skilled developers already have ends up being spent fixing all the screwups made by people who were only recruited to make up numbers. Gentoo needs better developers, not more developers. And where did i say their abilities wouldn't be verified? Come on now, you'll have to do better than that. One of the necessary abilities is to be able to get yourself recruited with the current process. Anyone who can't put up with the hassle of that isn't going to be able to put up with all the bureaucracy, delays and nonsense necessary to get anything done within Gentoo. In terms of figures a conservative estimate would be 25% wouldn't have the necessary skills and another 25% would be unsuitable. A conservative estimate would be that 90% of the people who decide to be developers because of such an initiative would be unsuitable. -- Ciaran McCreesh signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-dev] An Introduction to Gentoo Prefix
While some of you may have heard of it, we -- the Prefix team -- have the impression that for most developers the Gentoo Prefix project is in general an unknown, hidden and vague project, that primarily generates a lot of commits. Therefore, we have decided to try and explain what Gentoo Prefix is, and why we Prefix devs are so passionately about it. Let us start by pointing out that Gentoo Prefix is all but a new project. While the archeological signs of the project only go back to 2006[1], the project has existed before that in the minds of people no longer with us any more. The Gentoo Prefix project aims to bring the Gentoo Portage Tree to non-Gentoo and/or non-Linux systems, through the following two characteristics: 1) a free to choose target directory offset (prefix), in which packages are installed, and 2) the ability to install and operate without adminstrative privileges To understand why these two characteristics were chosen, it is best to get into the mindset of many Gentoo Prefix users (and devs). There are plenty of reasons, of which a few described in [2]. In short, the users are looking for convenience on their platform of choice, or platform they are doomed to use. Some people just have to work with Windows. Others just like Mac OS X over any GNOME or KDE. Some work with Solaris, others with AIX, or even their Atari. All of these systems have their merits and demerits. (Gentoo) Linux users are used to a very rich and convenient userland consisting of many GNU tools, such as sed, awk, grep, tar, etc., but also development tools such as compilers, autotools, etc. While these tools are absent, simply outdated or not as flexible as on Gentoo, users of said systems are in need of the flexible tool suite as delivered by Gentoo. An obvious solution is to get Portage running and to install the tools on the system in use. However, due to requirements, privileges, or an insane love relation, the original system may not be harmed by replacing or modifying existing software. Yes, in some cases, such modifications are even impossible by lack of privileges: no root access! In a really compact form, we can say that for Gentoo Prefix users: - an offset installation is necessary not to break the host OS software - sometimes root privileges are unavailable - unprivileged installations add an extra level of protection/safety - `rm -Rf prefix-offset-location` removes the entire Prefix and all traces of it Gentoo Prefix delivers unprivileged offset installations, which we call a prefix. The prefix here is the offset used for the entire installation, such as /home/sally/gentoo. A Gentoo Prefix system is bootstrapped into such prefix, by following a number of instructions, e.g.[3]. Using this prefix, the file system layout chosen by Prefix Portage is exactly the same as for a normal Gentoo Linux system, but shifted into the prefix. This would for instance result in /home/sally/gentoo/usr/bin for the previously mentioned example. In principle, it serves no use to have programs installed in bin, usr/bin, sbin, usr/sbin, etc. under the prefix, and it would make more sense if they would be installed all in one place. However, following the Gentoo Linux layout enables direct backwards compatability when the chosen prefix is the empty string, and requires no extra patching or changes. With this in mind, we would like to stress that it is not the desire of the current Gentoo Prefix project to go beyond the ability to install in an unprivileged install-time fixed offset. We consider the current approach as a milestone that delivers offset installations. Pilots within our own team have shown that on top of this milestone, further steps can be made, such as variable offset locations and close cooperation with e.g. a Gentoo Linux host system. However, we do not consider these works in progress as part of the *current* Gentoo Prefix project. Unfortunately, support for installing packages into a prefix, does not come for free. Most ebuilds need small changes, some ebuilds need extensive patching to get programs to install and run correctly with regard to the (offset) prefix. To get this all running, we set up our own tree, which contains all our converted ebuilds, extra profiles and modified eclasses[4]. At some point our tree became pretty big[1], and it turned out our enthusiasm (and that of our users) brought overlays.g.o down to its knees. At that point, our hobby got way out of hand, and to resolve the issue we had to switch to rsync, resulting in our own generated tree with metadata. As side-effect this greatly sped up the user experience[5], contributing to getting our hobby even more out of hand. We, as Prefix team, feel this puts our project in a bit weird position, where we resemble closely to an in-house fork of the Gentoo project itself. It is our desire and intention to move away from this situation, which not only consumes an awful lot of resources for
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 2009.05.05 18:37, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Mon, 04 May 2009 21:47:08 +0100 George Prowse george.pro...@gmail.com wrote: If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly [snip] That's not how it works -- we know this from last time Gentoo recruited a whole load of people without verifying their abilities. With lots of new developers, what little time skilled developers already have ends up being spent fixing all the screwups made by people who were only recruited to make up numbers. Gentoo needs better developers, not more developers. -- Ciaran McCreesh Ciaran, - From your post, it appears that standards were lowered during the recruitment drive you reference. If thats true, its a lesson for next time. That may well reduce the uptake rate compared to last time too but as you infer, new developers need the right skill set. At best, the publicity George suggests would raise awareness, which is the first step to getting more help of the right sort. - -- Regards, Roy Bamford (NeddySeagoon) a member of gentoo-ops forum-mods treecleaners trustees -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkoAgxkACgkQTE4/y7nJvavJCQCdF3eGtwDqJICelv43l1ssrUtI iz8AnAri0tO1E8Wb2ziIdGJtNAQOq6pj =+UmH -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 20:37:24 Ciaran McCreesh wrote: On Mon, 04 May 2009 21:47:08 +0100 George Prowse george.pro...@gmail.com wrote: If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly with a sufficient number of current developers who are willing to walk people through how and what it means to be a Gentoo Developer then the influx could create a new backbone of new developers who will hopefully be here for years to come. That's not how it works -- we know this from last time Gentoo recruited a whole load of people without verifying their abilities. With lots of new developers, what little time skilled developers already have ends up being spent fixing all the screwups made by people who were only recruited to make up numbers. Gentoo needs better developers, not more developers. We surely need more developers. Otherwise we ll end up maintaining 100x500 each one. Just look at the numbers ( total packages/total ACTIVE developers ). So first we need to attract more people. Evaluation and recruitment comes next -- Markos Chandras (hwoarang) Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Qt/Sound/Sunrise] Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
On Tue, 5 May 2009 21:19:49 +0300 Markos Chandras hwoar...@gentoo.org wrote: We surely need more developers. Otherwise we ll end up maintaining 100x500 each one. Just look at the numbers ( total packages/total ACTIVE developers ). So first we need to attract more people. Evaluation and recruitment comes next I have a better way of improving those numbers: remove two thirds of the packages from the main tree. -- Ciaran McCreesh signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, 05 May 2009 19:19:00 +0100 Roy Bamford neddyseag...@gentoo.org wrote: - From your post, it appears that standards were lowered during the recruitment drive you reference. Not quite. At the time, there weren't really any particular standards during recruitment. The system relied upon recruitment mostly being done or supervised by a smaller group of people who did it a lot and were fairly good judges of suitability. The system broke when someone who didn't do much recruiting pulled in a bunch of new people for obscure side projects that sounded cool without verifying that some of those people, say, knew what 'grep' was. The ebuild-related quiz questions come from my attempt at the time to reduce the damage until a proper solution could be implemented, which never happened because devrel decided to make other things a priority. And even then, the quiz rapidly became unsuccessful because recruiters would give people lots of attempts and lots of help to answer the questions, and would let people retake the quiz as many times as they liked -- the questions were designed to be instantly answerable, not research questions. At the very least, before attempting any mass recruitment, the quiz needs to be lengthened, brought up to date and split into answer these on the spot on IRC without having seen the question before and research allowed questions, and recruiters have to be prepared to fail most applicants. - -- Ciaran McCreesh -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkoAhWIACgkQ96zL6DUtXhHm8wCgtiMxlQUI4X8vkD4GNEZT4fFN OO0AoJSit88yibi59rizQG4ATLHvMFkl =I4JE -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
El mar, 05-05-2009 a las 18:28 +0100, George Prowse escribió: Thomas Sachau wrote: George Prowse schrieb: Thomas Sachau wrote: For those, who can work with IRC and are interested in working with ebuilds, there is already an option: Join #gentoo-dev-help or even better #gentoo-sunrise and read the documentation from the topic. The Sunrise Overlay (with the #gentoo-sunrise IRC channel) is open for everyone willing to learn and contribute to it. Even normal users can get access, learn how to create ebuilds, how to improve them and how to maintain them. As a starting point, this is a central overlay, where ebuilds are maintained, that dont get a developer as maintainer because of missing manpower. Additionally, all contributors learn the ebuild development work themselves. And if you are willing to learn and do continuously good work, there is a good chance that you may level up to a developer yourself someday. You want an example? This was my way to become a full Gentoo developer. ;-) So at least for ebuild maintainence, there are good starting points (probably other projects also have training grounds like the java or kde herds), the bigger problem may be the communication between potential new developers and the current developer base and our options to become a new developer. I think you are missing the point. If you sit and wait for them to join you will always be understaffed. Go on a big dev drive! Announce it all over all the Gentoo's normal communication channels and other generic linux places! Email some linux magazines, talk to distrowatch, message some large LUGs. Get people talking about it. Whatever happens, dont just sit on your hands. Tell the users that Gentoo needs them and that they can make a difference! If you make it a big and special occasion which is planned correctly with a sufficient number of current developers who are willing to walk people through how and what it means to be a Gentoo Developer then the influx could create a new backbone of new developers who will hopefully be here for years to come. Such a campaign would need quite some time and i dont have this free time. So if anyone is willing to do the needed work, i can try to help a bit, but cannot take the work and time myself. The only thing i can do and currently do whenever possible is pointing people to the sunrise project and helping them there. And thats what i did with my mail. I also fear that any sustained campaign would be bogged down in Gentoo's red tape. I feel it's necessary to clear that it's not mandatory to be a full time developer to help improve Gentoo. Many users want to help but they don't feel ready for such a compromise. Then there is Sunrise, and the overlays from the herds, where the prospective users can learn first and take the following step when they feel they're ready. I think there are at least 2 recent new developers who made it this way. There are several (much?) understaffed projects in Gentoo, the developers who are responsible of this areas could take some time to write a guide for users on how to help, with steps to commit patches to the overlays, wishes and needs... and then publish it in the project web page. Also, there could be a page similar to the 'staffing-needs' one, but listing links to the 'Help Us' pages of the projects. Just my 2c... And sorry for any spell/grammar error...
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
There is already such a place [1] but I think not so much people knows about it. [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/staffing-needs/ Mounir None of the problems mentioned here are present on that page, the information that could be useful is: how many developers are active, which are the short/long term objectives of the project, what are the actual problems/needs, news, etc. Each project could have this information on it's project page but it need to be easily accessed by the users and constantly updated, I'm sure there are people who doesn't have developer blood but can do that kind of informational work. -- Sergio D. Rodríguez Inclan - http://srinclan.wordpress.com Linux User #446728 -- http://counter.li.org/ --
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
George Prowse wrote: Peter Faraday Weller wrote: Hi Thanks, welp Sad to hear it mate. As the person who did your first install for you (i think) I think you will be missed. I am quite surprised about what you said about the state of things because i've got the distinct impression from others that Gentoo has been improving in the past 12 months. About the lack of the developers, something I proposed about 3 years ago might be applicable: has Gentoo ever thought about doing a Dev Day in much the same way as the Bug Days? Advertise a day where people can come and have a chat with developers and get coached because there is a vast amount of people and knowledge out there and I never see anything about Gentoo wanting people. If you book them, they will come. G In my opinion, such a drive wouldn't work. I've said it before in previous posts to the Gentoo -devel and -project lists, as well as my blog posts[0]: I think Gentoo needs to improve the organisation of the projects. I know it takes developer time to update project pages and do things like maintaining the developers wanted pages, but I think that Gentoo would see this returned in a higher number of competent developers. One of the biggest problems I have as someone considering becoming a developer is following what's going on and working out where I could make contributions that are both something I would enjoy doing and would be useful for current milestones (eg. autobuilds handbooks or improving / stabilizing KDE4) that are being worked on. [0] http://allenjb.me.uk/category/linux/gentoo On a related note, I thought the recent email from the Prefix project to the -devel list was excellent - it's exactly the sort of thing I would hope to find on a projects page on gentoo.org. It contains a detailed explanation of the project, its purpose, current state and aims and includes a roadmap so that (potential) contributors can easily see where they can help out in a way that will be considered useful by the development team. I would also like to see some less secrecy for things that are going on. For example, I know that the newsletter team are currently working on a new setup for the newsletter. While I somewhat understand some of the reasons that the developers involved have chosen to not give out information on this project, I question the overall value in keeping such projects secret in this manner. A project page with the current progress and a roadmap of the project on would not only keep everyone informed, but might encourage contributions (in the form of solving any specific problems the developers are having, for example, or in the case of the newsletter, preparing content to contribute). I've also spoken before on the bus factor, which I believe comes into play here. As far as I know only one or two developers are working on the project and if they were to disappear for a length of time for any reason, (virtually) all current knowledge of the project, its progress and its code / setup would be lost. This leads me on to another issue I have with Gentoo development, which I believe is related, and that is the organisation of the source code repositories. As far as I can see there appears to be no formal organisational scheme to this at all, which can make it really hard to find things. Ideally, I would like to see a scheme that generally goes something like: /project/subproject/task. So, for example, you could find all the docs under /documentation and all the newsletter content under /pr/newsletter. (On a sidenote, the SVN repos seem a little better on this than the CVS repos layout, but it's still not as clear as I think it could be) As always, I realize this would take time to change, but I (again) think there's a good chance that it would improve contributions (on the basis that potential contributors are more likely to actually contribute if they can find what they want to work on easily). AllenJB
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Training points for users interested in helping out with ebuild development
Ciaran McCreesh wrote: At the very least, before attempting any mass recruitment, the quiz needs to be lengthened, brought up to date and split into answer these on the spot on IRC without having seen the question before and research allowed questions, and recruiters have to be prepared to fail most applicants. We have actually been using an extra question battery for IRC for many years already. The quizzes are actively maintained by me so if you have suggestions about what needs improving please do tell and we can update the quizzes as needed. Currently we really don't need to fail that many people as those who end up at that point in the process almost always have good enough skills as they have contributed via overlays for quite a while. I would rather keep it like the current process where the bad people don't get mentored to the finish. Regards, Petteri signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] Retiring
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 23:45:14 AllenJB wrote: George Prowse wrote: Peter Faraday Weller wrote: Hi Thanks, welp Sad to hear it mate. As the person who did your first install for you (i think) I think you will be missed. I am quite surprised about what you said about the state of things because i've got the distinct impression from others that Gentoo has been improving in the past 12 months. About the lack of the developers, something I proposed about 3 years ago might be applicable: has Gentoo ever thought about doing a Dev Day in much the same way as the Bug Days? Advertise a day where people can come and have a chat with developers and get coached because there is a vast amount of people and knowledge out there and I never see anything about Gentoo wanting people. If you book them, they will come. G In my opinion, such a drive wouldn't work. [..] As always, I realize this would take time to change, but I (again) think there's a good chance that it would improve contributions (on the basis that potential contributors are more likely to actually contribute if they can find what they want to work on easily). AllenJB I am sure there are some developers which can offer a great amount of time to help/revibe slacking or dead projects ( e.g. userrel, newsletters etc ). The thing is that leadership on several projects is inactive hence users or devs who are willing to help are getting demotivated. It would be really nice each individual project to perform a clean up like: 1) have an internal discussion about its goals and future 2) Remove dead members and elect a new leader if necessary 3) Update the page 4) Publish its status 5) Assist for help is necessary Looking 'active' is very important to attract new people to project. Is this so hard? -- Markos Chandras (hwoarang) Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Qt/Sound/Sunrise] Web: http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
[gentoo-portage-dev] files in ${FILESDIR}
What about this idea: list all files in ${FILESDIR} (patches, init scripts),
related to ebuild in this ebuild like:
FLS=( some-init-script ${PN}-patch1.patch ${PN}-${PV}-patch2.patch ...
${PN}-patchN.patch )
then using this files by addressing his index in ${FLS} array
applying patches with command: epatch 1 ( or in batch mode: epatch 1 2 3 )
and init scripts like: doinitd 0
etc.
reason: easy automated way to moving ebuilds with all required files betwen
repositories/overlays
Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] files in ${FILESDIR}
On Tuesday 05 May 2009 02:26:21 Toha wrote:
What about this idea: list all files in ${FILESDIR} (patches, init
scripts), related to ebuild in this ebuild like:
FLS=( some-init-script ${PN}-patch1.patch ${PN}-${PV}-patch2.patch
... ${PN}-patchN.patch )
then using this files by addressing his index in ${FLS} array
applying patches with command: epatch 1 ( or in batch mode: epatch 1 2 3 )
and init scripts like: doinitd 0
etc.
reason: easy automated way to moving ebuilds with all required files betwen
repositories/overlays
downsides: updating of array causes ugly cascading of changes throughout the
entire ebuild instead of one or two lines. maintaining the info indirectly
with numbers makes reading ebuilds harder to understand and harder to maintain
(adding/dropping files).
such changes should be proposed on the gentoo-dev mailing list anyways ...
you'll get a lot more feedback as to why this is more con than pro.
-mike
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Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Symlinks with distutils
On May 5, 2009, at 10:37 PM, Michael A. Smith mich...@smith-li.com wrote: In theory, doing symlinks with distutils isn't a big deal, but distutils.core.setup doesn't have the capability built in. (distutils.file_util does, but it's not clear how to trigger that intuitively within setup().) So for the changes to gentoolkit for 0.3, I vote we keep the ebuild dosyms, and leave distutils out of the business of symlinks, to be revisited at a later date. Agree? Best wishes, Michael (a.k.a. kojiro) Sounds good to me. -Doug
