Petteri Räty wrote:
Mike Auty kirjoitti:
Petteri Räty wrote:
Defining required amount of activity for ebuild devs. I would like us to raise the required amount of activity for ebuild devs.

Given that the low number of developers is ranked as our number one problem in Donnie's informal survey[1], taking any kind of action against infrequently-committing developers is likely to reduce the number of devs we have, and potentially make the problem worse.


I agree with the above point.
Also, as I recall, both Pettery (betelgeuse) and Denis (calchan) have stated before that we no longer have any queue of people waiting on recruiters to join Gentoo. I'm not seeing an avalanche of new blood entering the distro, so I'm wondering where we want to go. If we keep going the route of the last months, I wonder how long it will take until we get under 150 devs. I don't think this will benefit anyone. Furthermore, the trend in the last months was in large part the result of finally retiring people that had been slacking for a long time. This proposal could (would?) lead to sending away people that still do work, albeit at a slower pace or on bursts.

What benefits are you aiming to get from the suggestion? I can think og keeping the books tidy and reducing management time required to maintain the devs. Are there others I've missed? If they're worth the cost/effort involved with putting someone through the dev tests and getting them trained, then it seems a good idea, but otherwise probably not...

Mike  5:)

[1] http://dberkholz.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/redux-gentoos-top-3-issues/

If you can't manage weekly commits, you can't respond to security issues either. This means that you should have devaway on.


As others have commented, I don't agree with this point. Also, you're forgetting we have quite a few people working on this project and that we have many different roles. Although you're talking about ebuild devs only - so doc devs, infra and forums staff are exempt from this rule - you're assuming (asking?) that all people with access to gentoo-x86 are package maintainers and do a few, regular commits to the tree. As others have said, that assumes people keep more than a few ebuilds and that those packages require constant attention. Recalling previous discussions about work on gentoo and some of the existing roles, what will you do to AT folks, release members or QA members? Are they also obliged to do a weekly commit to keep their "privileges"? Finally, I thought the whole point of removing access to infra boxes (which is the end result of retiring a dev), was a concern with security and not a way to get rid of people - with the exception of administrative action by devrel.

We've been having a few discussions about the future of Gentoo for some time and people have shown different goals and views on its future and on how to get there. One of the views seems to be that we need (only need?) an "elite" of super-devs that do daily (hourly?) commits. I have nothing against people that can give so much to this project, but I don't think it's reasonable, desirable or healthy to expect everyone to be able to that level of commitment. Also, wasn't this distro at one point all about community? I don't think raising the commitement level helps to involve people and as William (wltjr) pointed out shouldn't we be more concerned with quality than with quantity? I understand and agree that ebuild devs should keep a minimum level of work to justify their access to the gentoo-x86 tree. I would also like to have a few devs that can do major commits (although commit sprees can have their own problems), but I think there's still a place in this distro for people that want to maintain a few packages, that want to do AT work, that care with the QA of the tree or that work on releases. These people shouldn't be sent away, just because they can't keep with weekly commits (not enough work or time?) or because they work in bursts.

As a final thought, I think this point is a tangent to the old debate about tree-wide commit privileges and or the scm of the tree. Afterall, if gentoo-x86 was a git tree and or we had acls in the tree, I don't think we would be having or would need to have this argument.

Regards,
Petteri


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Regards,

Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org
Gentoo- forums / Userrel / SPARC / KDE
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