On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 07:00 -0400, Thomas Cort wrote: > There have been a number of developers leaving Gentoo in the past 6 > months as well as a number of news stories on DistroWatch, Slashdot, > LWN, and others about Gentoo's internal problems. No one seems to have > pin pointed the problem, but it seems glaringly obvious to me. We > simply don't have enough developers to support the many projects that > we have. Here are my ideas for fixing this problem: > > - Cut the number of packages in half (put the removed ebuilds in > community run overlays)
I'm not sure that this really would solve much of anything. I do agree that putting removed ebuilds in community-run overlays isn't a bad idea, but reducing the number of packages for the sake of reducing does nothing more than decrease the usefulness of Gentoo to many people. > - Formal approval process (or at least strict criteria) for adding > new packages This sounds like too much overhead. > - Make every dev a member of at least 1 arch team Absolutely not. The last thing that we need from a QA standpoint is having every single developer allowed "free reign" for marking their own packages stable, then completely ignoring bugs for any packages that are not their own. > - Double the number of developers with aggressive recruiting Why do people think that this is a good idea? I have a different one. How about we *half* the number of developers, keeping the people who do the most work, and let everyone else contribute as members of the community? Having developers on projects/teams/herds/whatever that do only a few commits a year doesn't do anything but artificially inflate our numbers. > - No competing projects I wouldn't mind this. The idea of competing *official* projects seems rather ludicrous. Of course, to counter this, we would need some way to create "semi-official" projects. Projects that are supported within themselves but not by "Gentoo" as a whole. This would allow for multiple teams to create projects that competed, but then let time and actual usage decide which (if any) becomes official. > - New projects must have 5 devs, a formal plan, and be approved by the > council I only agree to the second of these three points. Projects should have a plan. The council definitely should not be a bottleneck in starting new projects, unless someone was going to start paying us so we can meet all the time to make all these decisions. ;] > - Devs can only belong to 5 projects at most This is a really bad idea. Some developers simply work harder/faster/more than others. Setting up some artificial limitation on how many projects one can belong to won't help. Perhaps a better solution here is that all developers must belong to at least one project? Coupled with this would be that there would be certain expectations within the project for work completed. Developers who do not meet the "quota" are removed from the project. Get removed from all your projects and get retired. Simple as that. > - Drop all arches and Gentoo/Alt projects except Linux on amd64, > ppc32/64, sparc, and x86 Quite honesty, Gentoo/BSD (for example) has been excellent in finding issues with quality on many packages/ebuilds. The same can be said for many of the architectures. Also, remember that there's a difference between our supported architectures/projects and our unsupported ones. > - Reduce the number of projects by eliminating the dead, weak, > understaffed, and unnecessary projects This would be highly subjective. Who would do this? > - Project status reports once a month for every project To whom? -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee Gentoo Foundation
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