Presently, the way to make contributions as outlined in [1] is to create
a bugzilla ticket and attach the patch to that ticket. But there is no
community involvement really for this.
A possible model for increasing user-collaboration and promoting user activity:
>From User's POV:
- Do emerge --sync and get the tree (Obvious)
- Make changes, fix/add ebuilds in /usr/portage
- Do emerge --please-take-my-tree-to-community-review
What will emerge --please-take-my-tree-to-community-review do?
- Generate a suitable patch between the user's local tree and the
official tree
- Trigger pybugz[2] (or similar..) to create a new Bugzilla
ticketwith as much information
as possible. For example, it can be automatically guessed whether
the changes
are about fixing an existing ebuild or adds a new ebuild.
===
- In addition to the emails that are sent by bugzilla to the
developers or groups
responsible, a new email would be sent to
nice-users-that-will-help-me-review-my-code at gentoo.org for
community review.
This will help the user fix issues (The user might range from
complete novice to
almost-developer) according to feedback he or she recieves from other users.
Other users can also run the new ebuilds easily (will promote
sharing user contributions).
- Once enough people have used the new contributions, the changes
have more chances
of being merged into the official tree.
===
The bugzilla ticket can be suitably updated by the contributor. The
best part is that
the user doesn't need any git expertise and can focus on the task at
hand. This will
also help promote user discussion and the feedback-improve cycle for
user contributions.
IMHO, once it is extremely easy for the users to make contributions, they will
have less mental barriers to become contributors. The discussion on
the ML (or IRC),
will also help in deduplication/enhancement as some existing user(s)
might have already made
similar changes to the same ebuilds but didn't consider sharing them earlier.
As far as the execution is concerned, one possibility is to have a USE flag:
So if portage was installed with USE="dev-mode", all the above
features would be enabled
and dependencies like pybugz (or others) will be pulled in.
Who ever sets this USE flag should also have the possibility of adding
his or her email address
to the contributors ML through the terminal so that they can start
participating asap.
I'm not sure if this satisfies or handles all/any of the features that bernalex
had in mind but I think it would be a big step forward in user contributions and
making them feel that they are a part of the Gentoo community and that
their work
/contributions are deemed important. It might also make potential
Gentoo devs feel
that it is not *that* difficult to become an official developer as
they are already
contributing as a user.
PS - Not directly related, but the same model can most probably be used to help
users in suggesting would-be-good-to-have features and receiving
feedback on that
from other users, out of which some might actually take the bold step of
building it and sending it back to the requesting user.
All criticism is welcome.
[1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Submitting_ebuilds
[2]: https://github.com/williamh/pybugz/ (Package is www-client/pybugz)
Regards,
Ashish Gupta
