[Dev] Submitting patches

[Andreas Grapentin]

I'm commiting to reviewing and applying all patches that arrive on this
list in the future. Keep them coming, they are appreciated.

Best,
Andreas

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 10:37:43AM -0400, bill-auger wrote:
> yea its mostly that - its just unfortunate that there are not
> more people offering their time to support GNU and fully free
> distros - all of the FSDG distros have small teams - most of
> them are operated completely on a labor-of-love basis, and
> either the community is not giving back as much love as they
> could, or the community is too small to support even the small
> number of fully free distros that we have - also, most of them
> are LTS distros; and perhaps the need for community
> contributions is not as evident, or even present - a fully
> rolling distro like parabola requires much more love, to
> insulate it from the harsh realities of IRL, which cause the
> human resources available at any given time, to fluctuate
> unpredictably; as it will for any project without the funding to
> keep people wearing their volunteer hats all day
> 
> that fluctuation has swung low recently; but it could pick
> up again at any time - contributions, especially complete
> working PKGBUILDs, do remove some of the burden of package
> maintenance; but they need time to squeeze through the
> bottle-neck that is the total maintenance workload itself - in
> addition to packaging, there is server maintenance, installers
> and releases, user support, bug triage, and bug fixing - people
> may consider keeping their favorite packages on the
> bleeding-edge to be high-priority; but over-all, most packaging
> tasks, even the ones that block upgrades, are a relatively
> lower-priority task, compared to the critical essentials - that
> is really no different than what LTS distros do BTW
> 
> of course, the bleeding-edge is what characterizes a rolling
> distro; but if the server is not serving, or the installers dont
> install, or there are bugs that dont get fixed, or users can not
> get help, then there really is no distro at all - of course,
> community relations and filling packaging requests are
> important; but during times when we need to prioritize, those
> are the things which can be deferred with the least grief for the
> most people - again, things could pick up at any time; but that
> is the situation we are in this month
> 
> ovruni is currently the only one dedicated to upgrading
> packages, megver keeps on top the kernels, and freemor is giving
> time to user support and bug triaging - that just enough to keep
> the packages healthy; but of course there is always more that
> could be done, even in the best of times - currently, i am the
> only one who is putting a large number of hours per week into
> parabola; so anything else that i de-prioritize, will tend to
> languish somewhat, until we replenish the lull in volunteer/hours
> 
> for the past few weeks, i have been intentionally ignoring the
> bug tracker and mailing list, in order to focus on the
> high-priority tasks, such as the server and releases - it was
> a good time to do that, because oaken-source and i had just done
> a sprint to get the essential bugs fixed and packages up to date
> - it does not take long for a rolling distro to accumulate new
> problems and new maintenance chores though
> 
> everything posted to the mailing lists (including the spam) and
> bug tracker is sent to my email inbox; and i will address them
> eventually - rest assured, that nothing goes un-noticed - for
> example, when i get the time to upgrade iceweasel, and if no one
> else gets to it before me, i will definitely consult
> grizzlyuser's PKGBUILDs - its just a matter of when that one
> package will rise to the top of someone's priorities
> 
> as for on-boarding of contributors and timely acknowledgements
> of contributions, a community liaison would help a lot - two
> people volunteered to do that last year, and they are the ones
> who convinced me to open a community web forum; but so far,
> neither of them has given parabola much of their time - in other
> words, rather than feeling unappreciated because of lack of
> acknowledgement, please do take it upon yourself to be the one
> who monitors contributions and pesters us about the
> highest-priority ones - it is unfortunate if ever we miss
> opportunities to on-board new contributors - its one of those
> chicken-and-egg deals - the projects that have the spare time
> to on-board new contributors, are the ones that need help the
> least, and vice-versa
> 
> i have suggested that it may be good to open up the [*-testing]
> repos to a few heavy contributors, something like arch's
> "trusted users" - that would at least allow PKGBUILDs to be
> built and available for testing by anyone brave enough to enable
> the testing repos - im not sure how much it would be used
> though; or if the other parabola devs would concur; and again
> that new contributor system itself entails some extra work
> for me - ive actually done most of it already; but again, at the
> expense of other things of could have done - that could help a
> few popular packages to roll more freely; but what we really need
> is for a few people to dedicate a significant number of hours to
> parabola - if all of the current devs on the parabola roster
> could give parabola 4-8 per week, or if even one other person
> could put in as many hours as i have been, that would be enough
> to free any bottlen-necks, without any re-structuring
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