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GLEP 41: Making Arch Testers official Gentoo Staff

Author Simon Stelling <[email protected]>, Homer Parker <[email protected]>
Type Standards Track
Status Rejected
Version 1
Created 2005-09-07
Last modified 2014-01-22
Posting history 2005-09-15, 2005-11-13, 2007-08-17
GLEP source glep-0041.rst

Abstract

Arch Testers should be treated as official Gentoo staff.

Status

Rejected by the Gentoo Council on 2005-10-13. This GLEP may be resubmitted if the issues brought up in the council meeting, http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20051013.txt, are addressed in a new version of this GLEP.

Motivation

Since Mike Doty (kingtaco) created an Arch Tester (AT) project in January 2005 to reduce the developer's load and the amount of open keywording bugs for the amd64 porting team, many users have volunteered to become ATs. They are doing a fair share of everyday's work to keep the amd64 and ppc trees up to date. While they spent many hours and even had to pass the staff quiz, they are currently not recognized as official members of Gentoo.

Specification

ATs should basically be treated as staff. This includes the following changes to the current situation:

  • Get a @(subdomain_to_be_determined).gentoo.org email address. The email address will just be an alias, and will be forwarded to their @gentoo.org address if they go on to become a Gentoo developer.
  • Get read-only access to the gentoo-x86 repository. This doesn't have to be individual accounts, a single account, without a shell, with all of their keys will be sufficient.

There will be a 30 day probationary/mentoring period for new ATs.The lead AT/HT for arch/herd will be responsible for the mentoring period. If arch/herd doesn't have a Lead AT/HT, then either the arch/herd lead or the Strategic AT Lead will be responsible. The Lead AT is a seasoned developer that watches for talent, recruits and mentors ATs. Additionally, the mentoring period should be shortened to a minimum of two weeks if an AT wants to take the end quiz to become a developer, assuming he has been AT for at least two weeks. The amd64 porting team has handled situations like this for a while and only made positive experiences.

Also, the idea of an arch tester as a trustworthy user who is able to test critical changes (such as hard masked software branches), could be expanded to other herds. These 'ATs' wouldn't be called arch testers as the 'arch' is irritating, instead, herd tester (HT) could be used.

As arch testers (and herd testers) become official staff, they should be handled by DevRel.

Since ATs don't want to have to handle the big 'communication overhead' normally, they won't be subscribed to the gentoo-core mailing list and won't be able to vote.

Backwards Compatibility

All current active arch testers should be migrated.