As you've seen, Chainsaw is on the list as a council candidate. I use Gentoo in a professional capacity, as a UNIX systems administrator for one of the largest internet exchanges in the world [1]. Right now, I administer 42 machines running non-multilib hardened AMD64. The topic of "Gentoo in the enterprise" surfaces from time to time on the mailing lists, but the current direction that Gentoo is taking seems to steer away from it.
Should you elect me to the council, I will do my best to discourage the frequent usage of overlays. Not only can overlay ebuilds slip through the QA net that is frequently trawled through the main tree (and they often do), the ownership is not always clear. There is no central location to report bugs in overlay ebuilds. Last but not least, moving ebuilds out into overlays means that larger deployments like mine are unable to use them. One other problem that has appeared on my radar more then once lately. When developers lose motivation and stop committing to a package for which they are the sole maintainer it can take a considerable amount of time before this is dealt with in the form of a retirement bug or "last rites" e-mail. With a business dependency on some packages, that can be too long. I believe we should actively seek out such packages and see if another developer can be motivated to take the package over. Failing that, I believe no ebuild is a fairer situation then an outdated/stagnant ebuild with open bugs that are not looked at. Some automated QA processes like the tinderbox already help with this but without official recognition of these bugs as QA matters the full potential of it goes untapped. In writing this, I realise that some or all of what I have just written may be controversial to you. Can I ask that you speak with your vote and not in this mailing list. Regards, Tony "Chainsaw" Vroon 1: https://www.linx.net/about/index.html
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