[Openchrome-users] Openchrome version bump in Gentoo's official portage tree

[Peter Volkov]

? ???, 04/09/2008 ? 10:35 +0200, Marcus Priesch ?????: 
> how much effort is there to be the maintainer of the gentoo ebuild ?? -
...
> how is the procedure to mark something stable in the portage tree - how
> much must be tested ?!?!

It's hard for me to tell you how much effort requires maintaining/AT
work as I've never worked on/maintained X11 packages while the answer
really varies from package to package. Some packages are easy to
maintain, some require lot of work. In general I don't think that in
this area Gentoo differs from any other distribution. You'll need to do
version bumps (which assumes that you've tested package), fix newcomming
bugs and follow general Gentoo progress to use new features portage
provides.

Gentoo specifics in this area is that you'll have fix build bugs rather
often, so you'll have to know how to fix Makefiles if required. Also new
gcc/glibc versions sometimes introduce non-compatible changes and
normally we'll have to deal with them earlier then other distributions.

Arch teams[1] members emerge package with different USE flags (merging
with all possible USE flags combinations sometimes is impossible but at
least with most common is must) and run package, looking for
bugs/problems. Of course time required depends from package to package.

> if you could shed some light on this, there ould be a maintainer soon ;)

Well, you need to be developer to maintain package. But it's possible
for you to find proxy maintainer - developer which will review your work
and commit it to the tree. Unfortunately this side of our communication
with users is not well documented but if you wish to work like that you
can always contact teams/herds which maintain packages with similar
functionality. If you interested how to help Gentoo with other packages
or in other areas contact me off-list and I'll tell you possibilities.

Speaking about xf86-video-openchrome driver it's already in the tree.
Jeroen Roovers bumped it and although more tests are required I think
this package will be in good shape in nearest future.


[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/at/
    http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/x86/at.xml
-- 
Peter.