The main problem about workforce is growth. We've had some bad issues where that when we overnight got loads of users, and the increasing amount of users increased our levels of bugs and more reports, grew the packages, but as developers we couldn't match. We had to take in more devs, but this adds another issue, training developers.
Even if you think you're good you realize theres a lot of things to know, from policy to best practices, and including why some of the seemingly "illogical" behaviours of packages are the right way.
There you are right. I would have to learn some things. But if everything is found in the documentations, that would be easy.
There is inherent wisdom in quotes like this:
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the
requirements
document for a new application. The manager asked the master:
"How long will it take to design this system if I assign five
programmers to it?"
"It will take one year," said the master promptly.
"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it
take it I assign ten programmers to it?"
The master programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."
"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"
The master programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be
completed," he said.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
That's true. But I think it depends very much on how you share the work. Who has to do what.
As user I cannot see, how you share the work on the ebuilds. FreeBSD Ports has groups (for KDE, Gnome, ..., unspecified) and the people working on the ports are split into two categories, committer and submitter.
The commiter are the people which actually write the ports into the portstree. The submitter simple send bug reports with 'send-pr' - so I (I was a submitter for 9 ports) simple had to create ports or patches for ports, which I could submit with a script (So you didn't need so much time link we need on bugzilla to fill out a new bug report). (Is there a script for gentoo bugzilla to send bugreports easyer?)
The commiters could make their own ports and write it to the portstree, or the simply could add or patch a port from the work of the submitters and write it down.
When you are a known sumitter, the people trust you and your port comes into the portstree within a few hours.
How is this handled on gentoo's portage? Are there groups? How do I find out who created an ebuild? Are there responsibilities for troubles? Or is the only way to make a bug report?
Martin
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
