-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I sometimes have the feeling the number of people directly contributing to gentoo is decreasing and the number of people with their own overlays is increasing.
Q: "Why contribute? I have my own overlay." A: That is bad. There are several reasons: * most overlays don't get any reviews from any other person/dev and hence the quality is usually a lot lower than in the official tree (not necessarily because we are smarter, but because of more eyes) * overlays decentralize packaging which is a very bad thing and can cause so many problems that I cannot name them all here (most importantly overlay maintainers have no access to the trees profiles/ folder, cannot limit breakage that happened and cannot coordinate any delicate bumps of crucial system libs) * some overlay maintainers overwrite system libraries with their own versions, causing unnecessary bugs for users * user experience does not improve if he has to add a whole overlay for a single package * most overlays don't do pgp signing or even have thin manifests * many overlay maintainers do not even bother to communicate in bug reports about ebuild requests, so developers might not even notice that someone has already worked on an ebuild There is probably more. In the end the important thing is that an overlay is not a direct contribution to gentoo. Of course, direct contribution requires more work and more patience, but will solve all of the above problems. Q: What is direct contribution? A: There are many ways: * file a bug report with an ebuild request giving useful information about the package (I sometimes give up on working on an ebuild, because I don't use the software and have little knowledge about what users will expect from an ebuild) * file a bug report with an ebuild proposal, preferably after getting a review in #gentoo-dev-help or #gentoo-sunrise * communicate to devs that you are interested in becoming a proxy maintainer [1] * contribute to sunrise [2] the official user overlay (yes, also an overlay, but with very strict policy to ensure compatibility with the tree); here you also get a review in #gentoo-sunrise and we have mirrors on github and bitbucket to accept pull requests * start bothering the gentoo herds/projects directly, either in their IRC channel or in their official overlays (oh, an overlay again, yes... but most of the time the work done there flows directly into the tree with some delay); some are hosted on github etc * become a dev [3] Only do your own overlay if more than one of the contribution channels failed. As an example: if you propose binary ebuilds for software that is opensource, then devs will probably not like that. It is also fine to have your own overlay, e.g. for testing or for packages that are really alpha, but contributing directly is more awesome and benefits more users. - -- [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/proxy-maintainers/index.xml [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/sunrise/index.xml [3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?full=1#book_part1_chap2 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJSMcfoAAoJEFpvPKfnPDWzIgEH/iOpSMzGMNW1Q+Kz4r3jC0e1 rsZd4YU+EgdCZrzcbYpYFyoJXdHkf4O7PxhBaMcRjLTZRMsuc5dy4l2MiyfWcV8m RJ2zeeu2ts99IQqkjncLwL3zuPT7xGt8hutwg8JRyvR47b3kvQqTO0XDq8uRdC8P 6jUtYHwJAG4F/YRjk7+vsH8RmQ9jPWRUb9pe/k9puW0ltdFAgC9vTInJnZJAY7j4 SJLAkST14R7mxTs2Uaqsfq/AgRK0A3d5o4OISECOx40VKBup9HZQqKkHBmSnKUMv lwFtQpl6ZyhuSUUUAVTuPMYIAozO49nzrpJ/i7whZ1fuXapfXvFGKMJltp1ZfR8= =gxlp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
