Hi everybody. Sorry for crossposting, but many people whom I want to catch with this are not on gentoo-science. For the same reason lets keep this initial discussion here, on -dev. If we need to expand, lets take it to the gentoo-science, but then I would expect everybody interested to sign up ;).
Gentoo Science has been relatively quiet, even though we are making a steady progress on many fronts, but lately a few things has caught my attention and I think we can do better if create a bit more structure. At present we count 10 categories containing 309 packages (wow! Considering that it all started with some 20 packages I put in sci back when we did not have a two-tier categories yet, quite impressive :)). However looking at herds.xml I see only 10 devs listed, which just cannot be true (considering, according to my experience with bugzilla, that majority of these packages are actually maintained). The real situation is that many devs are quietly supporting their own packages but are reluctant to join the sci team officially. And it is this situation that I want to address. I see one reasonable rationale for this relctance to join: people are afraid "to get too much on theirs hands" by signing up. In reality the gentoo-science mailing list is really low on traffic (quite a relief in present times ;)), but nonetheless the sheer amount of packages may be frightening. Therefore I am proposing to recognize the fact that we (Scientific Gentoo project) became big and act accordingly: 1. We need more herds. The easiest possibility is to simply split them accordingly to categories. However, with 10 categories, this may be an overkill, or, with some categories having >50 packages an underkill, or simply may not correspond to maintenance reality (it will definitely fail on sci-libs for example). It is hard to tell without seing who does what, so I am going to ask for some feedback here (see below). 2. Should we create some subprojects? This really will have to be discussed in more detail when people respond and join corresponding teams I guess. However, while at it we may as well become a top-level project of our own. Right now Scientific Gentoo is under Dektop, which is at the very least strange (but all the other options back then were even less fitting..) 3. Mail aliases. Right now we have [EMAIL PROTECTED], which we should keep as an all encompassing alias for announcements or, well, I am not sure yet what else, but time will tell. In addition we should create new ones, one per herd. If by chance there are people interested in seeing *all* the bugs (which I somehow doubt, but theoretically?), we can reuse [EMAIL PROTECTED] for that as well.. So, right now I would like to ask for the feedback on the following: Q1) I would like to hear about the reasons why people are afraid to join the sci team. You may respond to me personally or raise it on the list, but please let me/us know about the problems in any case, so that we may address them! Q2) Please let me know if you are supporting or occasionally touching some package under sci-* and, assuming we create more herds, which herd it should belong to (just make it up as you see fit right now) and whether you would be willing to add yourself to the alias of that herd or join some subteam if we create one. I will collect the responces and then compile a proposal for the new structure. Q3) Not relevant to this restructuring, but always usefull: if you know of some package that you think should really go under sci-something, please let us know! And to finish it all up :) Q4) If you are a user but would like to be involved more actively, or you have to run that particular package for your work but it sits in bugzilla for ages and no developer seems sensible enough to take it up, please let us know too. Best of all - subscribe to that gentoo-scie mailing list and ask somebody to mentor you. By the time it will be over we should have a new structure, so you won't end up with the whole 300+ sci packages on your hands (this was holding some people with whom I discussed it too). This should be enough to start with, so, bring it on! :) George -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
