Hi, our concept of "Projects" (Herds in the past) maintaining packages has several problems. Which problems do you see? How can we improve the situation? How do we want to organize/cluster packages in the future?
I see the following problems: * We have ten thousand packages for few hundred developers. Projects can not heal the lack of resources. If a developer is member in 10 projects, she/he can only contribute a fraction of the "Gentoo-time" to each project. * Someone added the project to a package many years ago and nobody is left in the project who knows/uses the package. I saw this problem for example in Project:Games, where we have games that need a CD, but there is no developer in the project left who has access to the CD. (If you want to help: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/List_of_discs_by_developers) We have the same problem for hardware in Printing, Video, Sound. * Many projects are too heterogeneous Projects should only maintain either a) many similar packages such as libraries (like Perl, Python) or b) very few strong correlated packages (like KDE, Kernel, Xfce) It makes no sense to group packages by usage as in Science, Games, Theology, Sound, Netmon, Video, Electronics... * We need something between one developer per package, who reacts on every bug within days and the package is unmaintained. * The members of a project are not paid by Gentoo or the lead and want to invest their (spare)time only to specific packages. However a project makes only sense, if all members are willing to maintain the packages of the project. Project Graphics was now deleted without discussion. Have a look at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Category:Gentoo_Projects there are many projects with the same problem of Graphics. I think we should first find a consent about the following questions before someone deletes projects. * How do we want to delete projects? Vote? Decision by a single dev? Based on statistics? Based on inactivity? Based on lack of manpower? Based on useful package selection? * What is a good structure for a project? * Should we group packages by requirements? (Specific hardware needed. Special skills required.) -- Best, Jonas
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