[arch-dev-public] Improving overall experience for contributors

[Antonio Rojas]

El Wed, 24 May 2017 13:08:18 +0200, Bartłomiej Piotrowski escribió:

> We are open source distribution with pretty much closed development
> model. It is unsustainable in the longer term. There are 413 orphan
> packages in our repositories (excluding i686), some of the out-of-date
> flags are unhandled since 2014.

And those are just the literally orphan ones. We have many more virtually 
orphan packages due to some dev/TUs not giving signs of life for months, 
even years. We do have a serious manpower issue, which I think it is 
starting to affect the quality of the distribution (eg. several DEs are 
currently unmaintained), and I don't see this getting any better with our 
current recruiting model.
 I do like the idea of having a 'trial period' of a couple of months for 
new contributors, under the supervision of a mentor, in which they could 
have access to svn but not to the repos, and perhaps move the voting to 
the end of this period.
 And yes, we need a central place to communicate our needs to potential 
new contributors. Perhaps we could start with a wiki page until we set up 
something more sophisticated?