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
