• Re: [gentoo-project] RFC: "Trusted contributor model"

    From Joonas Niilola@21:1/5 to Matt Turner on Fri Jul 22 20:40:01 2022
    Copy: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org (gentoo development)

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    On 22.7.2022 21.18, Matt Turner wrote:

    How would you suggest we track who has commit access, etc? The same
    way we do with developers, via a developer bug?

    I ask because I've noticed a lot of inactive proxied maintainers—one
    of which had been listed in metadata.xml for 6 years but had never
    committed to ::gentoo.


    We can see them in gitolite's configuration. For example I can already
    see who has guru commit access (to which branch even) or to infra-hosted personal overlays. But I don't expect this list to grow very large, at
    least currently. A tracker bug wouldn't hurt either, if we can enforce
    it as part of the process early on (it can even be visible to infra-only
    or something)

    I must admit I haven't looked into actually implementing this in the
    main tree but I'm pretty sure our gitolite has to be included, which
    itself would solve this.

    -- juippis

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  • From Joonas Niilola@21:1/5 to Robin H. Johnson on Fri Jul 22 21:20:01 2022
    Copy: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org

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    On 22.7.2022 21.32, Robin H. Johnson wrote:

    BUT, we can't write a simple gitolite ACL that limits the content within profiles/package.mask or other files in profiles/ (we can write hooks
    that might be able to do this, but that still requires the challenge of validation inside the file).

    I'd EXPECT a contributor to WANT to package.mask a cutting edge version
    so it has time to bake and get well-tested, but if they can't do both
    parts of the commit themselves, this process is likely problematic.

    Well as I said I think the best way is to fall back to the current way
    of a dev merging it, via Github PR or other means. I'd say pushing these experimental packages is rather rare (for proxied people at least), and
    can also be added without KEYWORDS for example.



    How do we make the mentorship process more lightweight?
    (and possibly the quiz process, I haven't seen how the quiz has changed
    since I last mentored)

    Let's start with a potential intersection of your two ideas:
    (these numbers are arbitrary, but try to reflect what I see some of the trusted contributors doing)
    - 9 good submissions (patches or PRs) over a 3 month period [must be at least 3/month]
    - will get you an invite from recruiters to join
    - either without a mentor, or a lightweight mentor


    This is a bit complicated topic and I'm not sure if I'm the best one to
    answer the mentoring part. But I'd like to point out this kind of
    teaching and/or "lighweight mentoring" happen everyday in
    #gentoo-dev-help, #gentoo-proxy-maint and in related IRC channels, and
    in Github PRs... just that it's done by multiple different people in
    different places. So many people add a little bit to one's growth
    instead of one/two people adding a lot, making weaker bonds with
    contributors.

    Then again I would say the entry bar is very high right now, which in
    return gives us high quality developers, but maybe less people are even interested in attempting it. With these propositions I guess we can
    focus less on the quiz, and more on the existing positive contributions
    and interactions when considering someone.

    So to help "lightweight mentoring": Grant some person you've been
    proxying commit access, follow their commits and their bugzilla
    activity, and after some time if you get good vibes from the person,
    encourage them to widen their contribution areas. If they manage it
    after a while, they have most likely accumulated enough experience and knowledge to get recruited.
    If you tell people to attempt the quiz after seeing 10 commits from
    them, and after they've been around for a month, it's most likely going
    to end up being a very long road for everyone involved. Please don't try
    to rush and force the quiz - if GOOD verbose answers come naturally, the
    person is most likely ready.

    As I was trying to present in the original post, this way of recruiting
    would be for someone who's been around for a long time already (+year)
    and has been actively contributing and participating in the community,
    keeping up with Gentoo's development changes. It's not for someone
    trying to rush their recruitment. So in your example, I _doubt_ we'd
    take the initiative. But then again, it's really about people who
    impress us and make us say "why hasn't this person been recruited
    already?" - there are no metrics we should even try to list here.

    -- juippis

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  • From Andreas K. Huettel@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 23 12:35:15 2022
    To: gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org
    Copy: juippis@gentoo.org (Joonas Niilola)


    2nd RFC: Recruiting proven contributors without a mentor

    I'm aware recruiters don't really need to ask a permission here, but I believe it's great to gauge the general feelings about this beforehand.
    What would you say if recruiters started more actively approaching
    potential developers? And currently I'm talking about people who have
    been active for a very long time (+year or two), who keep up with development-wise changes in Gentoo (eclasses, EAPI, virtuals...),
    participate in the community, and always provide top-quality
    contributions, but for some reason never got a mentor? I'd like to point
    out that this method would only be for the very few ones and recruiting through mentoring would still be the desired method.
    Recruiting through
    recruiters would still require the candidate to fill the
    ebuild/developer quiz, and they'd have to pass it without a mentor. So
    I'll emphasize: Currently only few special ones would qualify.

    These who would fit here are the people where mentoring takes literally
    no effort. So someone could be mentor in name - which would also have
    the advantage that the future developer has someone to talk to if there
    are any problems or questions.

    I dont think this actually brings an improvement.

    --
    Andreas K. Hüttel
    dilfridge@gentoo.org
    Gentoo Linux developer
    (council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
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  • From Andreas K. Huettel@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 23 12:37:07 2022
    To: gentoo-project@lists.gentoo.org
    Copy: juippis@gentoo.org (Joonas Niilola)

    Once again new council has been elected: congratulations to the chosen members! And once again many nominees expressed their wishes to see more non-developer contributors to become official developers. Yet, only very
    few people (if any) are interested in mentoring them. I get it, the relationship between a mentor and their mentee is very intimate, and mentoring takes a lot of time. While the Github PRs are helping us
    increase the user contributions merged, perhaps it's distancing us from creating stronger bonds with the contributors? But more about this topic later.

    Actually, we are doing quite well in terms of recruiting at the moment.
    I would love to see this continue.

    And yes, mentors are important for that.

    --
    Andreas K. Hüttel
    dilfridge@gentoo.org
    Gentoo Linux developer
    (council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
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