On Sunday August 27 2006 11:24, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Michael Vasiliev wrote: > > I know that there is a lab of Gentoo in Haifa University (using their own > > overlay when it comes to hspell and KDE). Honestly, I'm a bit tired of > > Gentoo way of breaking^Wrunning things, and Debian seems more and more > > appealing every day. Let's establish how many Gentoo users are there that > > hspell is important to them. > > Totally lost you there, maybe because I'm thinking the Debian way. > > It doesn't matter how many Gentoo users that need hspell there are, so > long as YOU need hspell and can become a Gentoo developer. That is, at > least, the answer you would have got had you asked the same question > about Debian. If you do not intend to pick up the responsibilities of > the Gentoo hspell maintainer, what gives you the right to ask anyone else?
It is not that I am reluctant to be the maintainer for hspell. There is much more about being a full-blown Gentoo dev, other than version-bumping the packages I use. As far as I know, you can choose the category to work on, but you can't become a maintainer for a single package. The reason is that Gentoo devs get the CVS commit access for the whole tree, so it looks like the idea is to keep the developer group as small as possible, while still providing full coverage, even though there is always a need for staffing. > I don't know what is needed in order to become a Gentoo developer. I do > know that, under Debian (where what is mostly needed is patience), you > do not have to be one in order to maintain packages in Debian, as I can > readily attest to. Ok, as of now, they want us to move hspell out of the main tree, and into an different repository (overlay). The unified overlay system is a new addition to gentoo, I don't know how it would take off, but from personal experience, stuff you submit to an overlay just rots there forever without a chance of being included in main tree until one of the full-blown developers really cares. IMO, that's not going to happen, because noone cared for two years _now_ when it is still in the main tree. > p.s. > Don't get me wrong. As a Debian supporter, I wouldn't mind you > switching. It's just that, as a free software advocate who has a clear > preference to community projects over commercial ones, I tend to think a > community project lives or dies on its users' willingness to participate > in the load. Right, but in gentoo, judging from the hspell and other sad experience no matter how willing you are to participate by submitting ebuilds and fixing bugs, changes you make don't get to the tree until someone is willing to take the load of relaying them. > Gentoo, as far as I can know, is either the second or third most used > community Linux distribution (I don't know where slack is today), and I > will be a bit sorry to find out that it cannot recruit the manpower to > keep it serving the minorities. Then again, this may just mean that, > unlike what Sun would have you believe, community actually produces less > fragmentation than governed effort. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
