primary contribution channels

[hasufell]

While it is always a good thing to work on ebuilds in any form, be
it in your own overlay, in this forum or sharing it on irc channels,
there are also downsides to unofficial channels.

* people may not find your ebuild
* your ebuild might have severe issues, because it was not reviewed by
a gentoo dev
* overlays in general cause decentralization of packaging which is a
thing we should avoid whenever possible (overwriting of libraries with
different setups, incompatible profiles, no coordination of stable
arch/masking/new eclasses, etc...)

That is why you should not stop here, after you discussed your ebuild
with other users, but head to the primary contribution channels which are
as follows:

* file a bug report with an ebuild request giving useful information
about the package (I sometimes give up on working on an ebuild,
because I don't use the software and have little knowledge about what
users will expect from that ebuild)
* file a bug report with an ebuild proposal, preferably after getting
a review in #gentoo-dev-help or #gentoo-sunrise
* communicate to devs that you are interested in becoming a proxy
maintainer (this requires that you have a working ebuild)
* contribute to sunrise the official user overlay (sunrise has
very strict policy to ensure compatibility with the
tree); here you also get a review in #gentoo-sunrise and we have
mirrors on github and bitbucket to accept pull requests
* start bothering the gentoo herds/projects directly, either in their
IRC channel or in their official overlays (most of the time the work
done there flows directly into the tree with some delay); some are
hosted on github too like gentoo-haskell or gentoo-science
* become a gentoo dev


also check out https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/How_to_contribute_to_Gentoo

Contributing to gentoo is more awesome than just running your own overlay.

Stuck by NeddySeagoon 26 Sep 2013