Damien Levac posted on Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:49:03 -0500 as excerpted: > As an aside, which may or may not reflect the view of other potential > candidates, even though I use git for my personal projects, having to > learn CVS would not be an issue if I'm already willing to learn > everything else. (However, if there is no guarantee that this will be > useful, why is it a requirement in the first place?)
IMO, learning CVS shouldn't be a problem once people know they want to be involved in gentoo, once gentoo is on their short-list, so to speak. which generally means that people are gentoo users, thus being comfortable with gentoo and having it on their short list, before they become gentoo devs. What concerns me is that a lot of folks may simply never be getting to that point. Back when I was originally researching gentoo, it was not only for use as a user, which I became, but also with the idea that I wasn't interested in a distro that I wouldn't at some point be interested in contributing to, ultimately as a dev, should it come to that. Back then, we were much closer to the whole zynot thing, and I did my due diligence there as part of my gentoo research. I came to the conclusion that the poor guy must looking in a mirror and mistaking his own defects for those of others, DRobbins and gentoo in this case. Kind of ironic how often that seems to happen, but it sure seemed to be happening there. That's all water under the bridge now, but the point remains, I did that research because I wanted to be sure I was comfortable with gentoo enough to be proud to be identified with it, to the point of being a dev if it should come to it. If I were doing the same thing today, I'd be doing my research, and well before I became a gentoo user I'd see this CVS thing. Knowing what I know (or arguably simply perceive, possibly incorrectly) about how outmoded that technology is, I'd have gentoo crossed off my /long/ list even before I knew enough about it to properly consider it. I strongly suspect I'd end up on arch. Arch, it would seem, is where a lot of Linux users looking for a user customizable distribution that would have formerly ended up on gentoo, end up. It certainly has the buzz that gentoo had back in the day, and that's been the case for some years now. So my concern is that the people we're potentially losing due to CVS are being lost so early in their evaluation process that they're not even gentoo users yet, and for all practical purposes, we don't even know they exist or were a potential gentoo dev in the first place. Meanwhile, my personal devhood blocker is the same as it was five years ago. Apparently, IRC is a hard requirement. At least the one final evaluation must be done on IRC. But in that regard I guess I'm an old fogey. I strongly prefer and function better with the async nature of email and mailing lists, and have enough negative experience with synchronous "instant messaging" type apps to know better than to subject myself to what is in effect the stress of a job interview, in an environment I already know I'm not at my best in. It may be stupid objection, but it's a hoop I'm not jumping thru, at least not if there's not some potential for it to pay my bills on the other side. And if it's so stupid and insignificant, that goes both ways, it's stupid to force such a stupid hoop-jump from what are after all volunteer recruits, when there's such a claimed developer shortage. Either there is such a shortage and such trivial hoop-jumps should be cleared from the process as unjustified extra costs, or there is no such shortage, rather more an overage of candidates, and gentoo can afford to place such hoop-jumps in the process in ordered to help trim the list of candidates to some reasonable level. So while I initially thought I might eventually become a gentoo dev (and did have several offers of mentorship), and used to feel a bit guilty about not getting around to studying for the quizes, etc, once I found out about the IRC hoop-jump, I decided I had better things to do with my time, and didn't worry about the quizzes, etc, any more, as that was now someone else's problem, not mine. In a way it's sad, as I've outlasted a generation or two of devs by now, and expect I'll outlast a few more. What might I have contributed in that time? But as volunteers will, I've found other projects to volunteer my time and talent to, gentoo users have their own contribution to make too, and given how important IRC evidently is to being a well functioning gentoo dev (well, that, or there's enough of an overage of recruits that as I said they need a way to weed out a few), I couldn't have been happy doing it anyway, so it's good I found out before seriously getting into the quizzes, etc, wasting both my time and that of the recruiters. So these days I don't worry about it, except to the extent it affects me as a gentoo user. The dev stuff is clearly not a problem I need to worry about. -- 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
