On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Kent Fredric <ken...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > As such, I believe Arch Testers should have themselves an IRC channel, > where Arch testers are OP, and membership of arch testers is voluntary > ( but encouraged ). >
The history here is that ATs typically hung out in the arch channels themselves, like #gentoo-amd64. Back in the day when the arches were new, there was a lot of general activity in these channels around adapting packages/etc. For the more minor arches it may still be that way. The ATs were viewed as just another part of that. Non-dev ATs were typically given at least voice in these channels. Back in those days the arch leads were also fairly active positions. Different arches sometimes had different policies on the role of ATs, and for non-dev ATs there was close coordination since a dev would need to make the commits. These days upstream is a lot more attentive to the more popular archs (IMO), so there isn't as much widespread patching/porting/etc going on. I think this is part of what has led to the drop in arch team activity, and AT activity as well (nobody is recruiting/encouraging/etc them). I'm not trying to dismiss your suggestion. I just wanted to point out that ATs do actually have a place of sorts right now other than -dev. They just don't have one place across all arches. Maybe that should change, maybe not. I'd be interested in the thoughts of the ATs themselves. -- Rich
