On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 5:31 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > The quality problem is that we have too many developers. If you make > community contributions easier, sane and more reliable (due to code > review) then you solve several problems at once, because you need _less_ > developers. Are you aware that we could potentially "pull" in hundreds > of contributors who chose to work on their personal overlay instead of > the gentoo tree? Are you aware that there are a lot of those people?
Yes and no. I'll agree that with a review workflow we might only need one reviewer for every 10 contributors, or something like that. If we have 100 active devs today, in theory we could instead turn 20 of them into reviewers, and now we can support 2000 contributors. There are some big assumptions with this kind of argument, though: 1. We might find that we don't even have 20 devs interested in doing a substantial amount of review. 2. The main repository is very diverse. If 50% of our packages have only one person interested in maintaining them, then they get dropped since reviewers will ignore their contributions. Or, they'll just rubber-stamp them which is adding valueless work. So, a review system could make manpower either more of an issue or less of one. I suspect that trying to force it would basically end up putting the entire distro on hold until most of the current devs quit, and a new crop signs up who is interested in using the new workflow, and then they're starting with zero experience. I think a review model is best implemented by individual project teams. They could use it to track changes in an overlay or branch in the main tree, and then move those into the main tree using whatever quality system seems best. The team can figure out what is working best for it, and if over time a large number of devs feel that it is a good way to work we could then talk about doing it with the main tree. I still suspect we'll end up having problems with the 70% of packages that don't fall into a project though. -- Rich
