On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Peter Stuge <pe...@stuge.se> wrote: > less idiotic > idiots such as perhaps myself need years because we're doing > whatever work as opposed to learning foundation bylaws by heart.
Well, I don't think the bylaws are a terribly important topic for the quizzes, and unless something has changed I don't think they were a topic in the past. Sure, developers should understand the role of the council and the trustees, but that doesn't mean that they need to be qualified to BE a trustee. However, I think that it is important to include a fair bit of "meta" in the quizzes. In fact, I'd consider this almost more important than the technical content. A developer who doesn't understand some nuance of ebuild development, and recognizes this, and therefore acts with maturity in asking for help and review before doing commits isn't much of a danger to the distro. A developer who is a technical wizard and creates bots that do massive tree-wide commits to correct some perceived problem without gaining consensus from the community is a danger to the distro, even if most of the time they are completely right. I think it is more important that a developer be able to work with others and recognize their own limitations, than to worry about what those limitations are exactly. When I look at most of the issues impacting Gentoo over the years, rarely are they caused by some bug in an ebuild. They happen, and they get fixed, and usually the impact is very minor. What really causes havoc around here is when people change ebuilds without consulting with the maintainer, or when they go tweaking system packages without a great deal of care and being part of the appropriate team, and so on. Lack of respect on mailing lists has caused no small number of problems either. Many of these issues have dwindled in recent years, and I think it is precisely because teams like the recruiters have been paying more careful attention to them. Anybody can write good code. You don't need to be a Gentoo developer to do that, and if somebody lacks maturity and social skills they're probably better off doing their work on the side with a proxy maintainer pulling it in. Calchan had both, and he still ended up being more successful with OpenRC from the outside. The KDE team has in the past made use of bleeding-edge portage (or even non-portage) features in overlays for development purposes, driving PM development in the distro to yield an improved result when everything got merged back in. The bottom line is that you don't need commit access to do great things with and for Gentoo. What the Gentoo devs really need to be about is making all that great code work nicely together. That requires coordination and an eye to quality. That requires working well with those who differ in opinion. That said, I don't want to diminish the importance of technical skills too much. I think Gentoo has created some really good infrastructure that rivals what has been done with much larger distros. Rich
