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Erlend
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Joined: 26 Dec 2004
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 Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 4:11 pm Post subject: Maintainer wanted |
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It seems recently there have been an increasing number of packages not in portage, with a bug (including ebuilds) sitting for months with the status: "Maintainer-wanted". Why is this? Is there a lack of developers, or are there just more open source applications to maintain these days?
For example,
GraphicsMagick
Miro
Zattoo
screenkast
As well as some very old versions of other packages, including Compiz.
Was the sunrise overlay invented to try and avoid this problem?
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think4urs11
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 4:47 pm Post subject: Re: Maintainer wanted |
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| Erlend wrote: | | Why is this? Is there a lack of developers |
Yes
| Erlend wrote: | | Was the sunrise overlay invented to try and avoid this problem? |
Partly, but as with the official tree if there is noone interested to maintain a particular package ...
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Erlend
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think4urs11
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 5:04 pm Post subject: |
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Nope, this is an ubiquitous issue since years.
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Erlend
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 5:07 pm Post subject: |
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Is there a solution?
Make it easier to become a maintainer?
What if the model was changed: instead of a central group of developers doing all the work and making ebuilds, there was a repository people submitted ebuilds to. These would be rated by users and once considered reliable enough reviewed by a maintainer?
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Voltago
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 9:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Erlend wrote: | | Is there a solution? |
You mean other than becoming a Gentoo dev yourself? Probably not. |
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Erlend
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nonas
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Joined: 17 Apr 2005
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 9:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Erlend wrote: | | What if the model was changed: instead of a central group of developers doing all the work and making ebuilds, there was a repository people submitted ebuilds to. These would be rated by users and once considered reliable enough reviewed by a maintainer? |
Isn't it one of the purpose of bugs.gentoo.org ?
I prefer something like bgo than something like AUR. |
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think4urs11
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 10:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Erlend wrote: | | AFAIK there is no way to just become a dev... they are really strict about who they accept. |
Depends on your definition of strict; it is far from impossible.
All whats needed is a reasonable minimum level of dedication and knowledge about technical things like ebuild structure and such.
Or competencies in writing documentations, social skills for tasks like the forums, user/devrel, public relations, etc....
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Carlo
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 10:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Erlend wrote: | | Is there a lack of developers, or are there just more open source applications to maintain these days? |
Yes and yes. Also adding new packages is lowest priority. Just grep the tree for "maintainer-needed" and you have the list of packages in the repository without a maintainer.
| Erlend wrote: | | Was the sunrise overlay invented to try and avoid this problem? |
Everytime I looked at it, the quality of the ebuilds wasn't that good, so I'm inclined to think it is another sort of problem, together with numerous other overlays. Another point of view is to think of it as a valve.
| Erlend wrote: | | Make it easier to become a maintainer? |
Implies lowering the quality of the repository, so this is not an option. Actually it is surprisingly easy to become a maintainer and everyone who denies that either didn't try or simply isn't good enough. Of course it requires a minimum of knowledge and a certain budget of time. We don't need guys who add a bunch of - maybe even broken - ebuilds to tree and then disappear after a few months. This happened too often in the past.
Personally I'm less and less interested to fix bugs in ebuilds added by other devs, who then dissappear or even worse think they can abandon a package or dropping it on a herd alias, not caring about it anymore and add other ones instead. My personal activity stats regarding tree maintenance are pretty low for months now and this is one of the reasons. If I add a new package, then because of a new dependency to an existng package maybe, everything else I'm playing with stays in my private overlay.
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Erlend
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| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 10:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Carlo wrote: | | Erlend wrote: | | Is there a lack of developers, or are there just more open source applications to maintain these days? |
Yes and yes. Also adding new packages is lowest priority. Just grep the tree for "maintainer-needed" and you have the list of packages in the repository without a maintainer.
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Makes sense, but there do seem to be quite a few missing packages. Traditionally Gentoo has been good for having (almost) everything you'd need or want in one repository; now even Ubuntu has some packages that are missing in Gentoo.
| Carlo wrote: |
| Erlend wrote: | | Was the sunrise overlay invented to try and avoid this problem? |
Everytime I looked at it, the quality of the ebuilds wasn't that good...
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Definitely true. Also the versions are often quite old.
| Carlo wrote: |
| Erlend wrote: | | Make it easier to become a maintainer? |
Personally I'm less and less interested to fix bugs in ebuilds added by other devs, who then dissappear or even worse think they can abandon a package and add other ones instead. My personal activity stats regarding tree maintenance are pretty low for months now and this is one of the reasons. If I add a new package then because of a new dependency to an existng package maybe, everything else I'm playing with stays in my private overlay. |
Do you see Gentoo moving that way then - where the central repository contains just a basic set of stable packages?
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Carlo
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| Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 5:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Erlend wrote: | | Makes sense, but there do seem to be quite a few missing packages. Traditionally Gentoo has been good for having (almost) everything you'd need or want in one repository; now even Ubuntu has some packages that are missing in Gentoo. |
Well, as odd is it was (and still is) back then to compare Debian stable to Gentoo, this distribution named Ubuntu popped up and found its userbase. Ubuntu builds on Debian unstable afaik, so beside their own work, they build on the work of the Debian developers, who count at least three times as much heads as we do, not to forget that they ship binary packages, so don't have to deal with the whole class of build issues, we have to. And - especially when it comes to desktop applications - the rate of duplicates and invalid (wrong assumptions, people not reading the documentation of Portage, PEBKAC issues, ICEs due to broken hardware) bug reports is everything else than low. I just had a look at Bugzilla: The list of packages requested to be included in the repository in the last 30 days counts 113 entries; We definitely can't keep up adding packages at this rate - not nearly. On the other hand, the repository is growing constantly, albeit slowly nowadays, so it's not that no packages get added. While I can understand wanting a set of packages to be added to the repository, comparing us with a binary distribution is worse than comparing apples and oranges and when you do choose Gentoo just for the number of packages someone else takes care for, you better have a look what other distributions offer.
| Erlend wrote: | | Do you see Gentoo moving that way then - where the central repository contains just a basic set of stable packages? |
Definitely not. What I see is, that the overall quality of the repository and Portage are improving, some teams within Gentoo do an incredible job, e.g. the state of the Java support within Gentoo has never been better. What I see is the need for more people to participate, filling up the developer ranks. As I noticed before, I'm not fond of the rise of overlays, among other reasons because of the disintegrational aspects.
So: We want you to take care of the packages you're interested in. If someone else were and had enough time, the particular packages you listed likely would have been added.
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yngwin
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Joined: 19 Dec 2002
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Location: Suzhou, China
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| Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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We already have very many packages in portage. There may be one distro that has more packages than Gentoo, and that would be Debian. But because they split off -dev packages and such, it could actually be that we have the highest number of packages of any distro. Even so, there are just so many open source projects that it is practically impossible to add them all. And as mentioned above, we already have a number of maintainer-needed packages in the tree.
We have a pretty stable team of about 250 active developers. This number hasn't changed much in recent years. Yes, developers leave, but all the time new ones join. But these developers are volunteers, and have limited time and interests. If there are packages you want to see added to the tree, then there are several possibilities:
- convince a developer who maintains related packages that this one is really worth adding
- ask a developer if you can maintain the package by proxy (which means you need to know how to write ebuilds and submit these through the dev, keep track of updates and issues)
- join the sunrise project, where you also learn how to write ebuilds and are responsible for maintainership
- become a Gentoo developer yourself
This is exactly how I became a dev myself. There were a few packages I am interested in, that I wanted to see in portage (smplayer and qtcurve for example). I started with making my own overlay (berkano) and maintaining ebuilds in there. I tried to get some other devs interested in the packages I thought would be a good addition to the tree. Finally they asked me to become a developer myself.
If you have some time to devote to Gentoo, you could do worse than joining the Sunrise project, learn how to write ebuilds, how to maintain packages and deal with bugzilla.
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Lubomir
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Joined: 17 Dec 2005
Posts: 155
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| Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 7:51 pm Post subject: |
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One of the dev was kicked out and now it seems that there is no one any more who cares about the acx wireless driver. A very important version, that where wpa-support for mac802.11 come into the driver, is not in portage since february. 
And yes, zattoo would be interesting. I also wait to get a working ebuild of it (thats why i found that post here).
But gentoo is my favourite OS (look down to my gentoo-logo on my t-shirt  ) and i think i would not change in the next years  |
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