Stephan Kulow wrote:
Our ideas are just ideas, but I had several discussions in various places and nobody offered a better idea. So we really would like to start with it and I would like to hear your concerns so they can be part of the final solution.
There has been some feedback that in all the enthusiasm of throwing ideas out we still lack a good summary of the goals behind all of those proposals. So here's my attempt to contribute to the mess by writing yet another mail :-) tl;dr skip to "Long story short". According to the numbers the amount of packages in Factory is increasing➀. However, at the same time the download statistics➁ show that the number of actual Factory users does not grow. The former can be explained by successful efforts in the past which had the goal of getting more packages. Regarding the latter the openSUSE team thinks that one of the reasons for the stagnation is that many don't perceive Factory as reliable enough to run it on their development systems. At the same time however more users that actually use Factory are needed to find issues early and fix them quickly. One needs to feel the itch to start scratching. So this is some kind of a chicken and egg problem. Therefore we proposed➀ to create a process that keeps Factory as usable as possible for our contributors (ie zypper dup should be fairly safe at any point in time). This means Factory becomes a more viable option for using it as "rolling distribution". That designation in our opinion includes also regularly releasing ISO image snapshots with working installer so people can get started somewhere. Crucial part to get there is introducing openQA➂ and staging projects➃ in the process. All the work for that cannot be put on the shoulders of just one guy. So we want to have a distributed, balanced and robust development process ie share the workload among teams with different roles. To make sure we get motivated people for those teams the process needs to be set up in a way that promotes mentoring and recognition➄. So what kind of skills do we need there? The increasing amount of packages indicates that the entry level of packaging is covered quite well in the current system. The bottlenecks we have are in the integration. What we need are more people that are up to the challenge of taking care of the "core" packages and the integration of them. So that's the kind of contributors we need to have in mind first with the new Factory. Long story short, the goals in those proposals are - more focus on hardcore package maintainers and distro integrators - ensure Factory is usable at any point in time - have a distributed, balanced and robust development process - promote mentoring and recognition cu Ludwig ➀ http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-11/msg00920.html ➁ http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2013-11/msg00094.html ➂ http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00132.html ➃ http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2013-12/msg00044.html ➄ http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2013-12/msg00147.html -- (o_ Ludwig Nussel //\ V_/_ http://www.suse.de/ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org