Cross-posting to gentoo-dev and -project lists due to technical and non-technical nature. Reply-to is set to -project.
Once again new council has been elected: congratulations to the chosen members! And once again many nominees expressed their wishes to see more non-developer contributors to become official developers. Yet, only very few people (if any) are interested in mentoring them. I get it, the relationship between a mentor and their mentee is very intimate, and mentoring takes a lot of time. While the Github PRs are helping us increase the user contributions merged, perhaps it's distancing us from creating stronger bonds with the contributors? But more about this topic later. 1st RFC: "Trusted contributor model" I'm proposing us to giving special commit access to our well-reputable contributors (mostly proxied maintainers). They'd have access _only_ to their maintained package in git-tree. To understand what I mean, check git shortlog -s -n net-im/telegram-desktop-bin/ git shortlog -s -n net-im/signal-desktop-bin/ There are few packages like these where I'd already trust the core proxied maintainer to commit at their will. It's as ajak said during the council election; _We_ are the bottleneck currently reviewing and _testing_ contributions, and with these two examples above, 99 % of time everything's in condition and we just need to merge. Obviously if these trusted contributors had to touch another package, or anything in profiles/ (just basically anything outside their dedicated package directory) they'd have to do a PR or .patch file to be merged by official developers. And they'd still need a proxy Gentoo developer/project listed in metadata, at least for now, to take responsibility. On the technical side I'm not sure how to achieve this, but I know it can be done. For example the sync-repos are compiled like this all the time. If this proposal gains support, I'm willing to start figuring it out more in-depth. AFAIK Fedora and Arch have somewhat similar systems in place already. 2nd RFC: Recruiting proven contributors without a mentor I'm aware recruiters don't really need to ask a permission here, but I believe it's great to gauge the general feelings about this beforehand. What would you say if recruiters started more actively approaching potential developers? And currently I'm talking about people who have been active for a very long time (+year or two), who keep up with development-wise changes in Gentoo (eclasses, EAPI, virtuals...), participate in the community, and always provide top-quality contributions, but for some reason never got a mentor? I'd like to point out that this method would only be for the very few ones and recruiting through mentoring would still be the desired method. Recruiting through recruiters would still require the candidate to fill the ebuild/developer quiz, and they'd have to pass it without a mentor. So I'll emphasize: Currently only few special ones would qualify. But seeing the general lack of interest towards mentoring, maybe this is something we _need_ to do in near future. -- juippis
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