Mike Auty wrote:
So the still unanswered question appears to be, would we like Gentoo to have fewer packages and less choice but greater QA, stability and a feel of professionalism, or would we like to have more packages and choice but a worse QA record, make some mistakes, and have a more community-based feel? If you're going to try to answer this question please be delicate with your repsonses, in the past I can recall developers leaving over exactly this divide...
Well, Gentoo is about choice, so why not be both? We already have ~arch/arch and overlays, and if the need really arose we could have more levels of QA. Then everybody can have the level of bleeding-edge that they desire.
Maybe all we need is to make it easier to contribute to overlays and use overlays, and then have a moderately-higher general level of QA in the main tree, and then the highest level of QA for stable (particularly for system packages). You could even have the opposite - maybe a super-stable overlay for stuff like server apps with backported patches that users could elect to take priority even over the portage tree. The only real gap is a general facility for assigning priority for repositories (possibly on a per-package basis), and maybe a GUI for managing everything.
Regardless, as long as devs actually follow policy I don't see any need to boot them. Maybe very long periods of inactivity should result in having accounts locked as a security measure (so that we don't end up with hundreds of ssh keys with commit access floating around who knows where). Booting out lots of devs just takes a limited set of resources and limits them further. If anything we want to find a way to let more people contribute in a significant way - not less...
-- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
