Ever heard of ‘proxy-maintainer’ before?

January 14, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo

This poped up recently @ -dev ML [1]. It turns out that is little ( or not at all ) documentation about this, which is quite unfortunate since it is one of the most easy and important ways a user can use to assist us on development. A couple of months ago I blogged about Sunrise Overlay[2] as a good way for users to extend their knowledge on ebuild writting and contribute their own ebuilds on an official gentoo overlay. This of course requires a significant amount of time and effort which is hard to find nowadays.
There is another way for you to help us put your shiny ebuilds on portage. You can become proxy-maintainer of any package you like as long as it doesn’t have a Gentoo developer as maintainer.

How does this work?

Since there are no official documentation available, these are the rules you should follow to become proxy-maintainer:

1) Open a bug for your package

2) Attach your ebuild and state that you want to be proxy maintainer for this

3) Assing or CC the bug to the more appropriate herd[3]

4) Wait for a developer to pop up and accept your offer

As proxy-maintainer you should do all the required work to ensure your package is fully working and up2date. This may requires to follow upstream changes and mailing lists and visit occasionally the bugzilla to find out if there are open bugs for your package. This is an excellent opportunity to become an active member of Gentoo developer community and a big step for improving this great distro. Furthermore, you can always jump the gap and become developer[4] if you think you are willing to contribute in regular basis :)

I really hope this post will clarify this “unknown” term and motivate you to become proxy-maintainer :)

[1] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_8c710130ea7281f9815ef84fdd2216a9.xml

[2]http://hwoarang.silverarrow.org/?p=385

[3]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/herds.xml

[4]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2

Tags: Gentoo, overlay, proxy-maintainer, sunrise

Comments

4 Responses to “Ever heard of ‘proxy-maintainer’ before?”

Pavel on January 15th, 2010 2:44 am

Hi,

I proxy-maintain some some 4 or 5 packages in the tree and am preparing to pick up a few more next month. I also didn’t know about this option until I teamed up with Diego Flameeyes Pettenò some 2 months ago. Working with him has been a great experience (thanks Diego) – so I definitely recommend everybody who wants to learn something and improve Gentoo at the same time to pick his favorite dev and ask him for help with this or that unmaintained package. If anybody should want to know more about being a proxy-maintainer from a proxy-maintainer point of view, go ahead and ask me (either here – hope you dont mind Markos, or via gmail.com, under stratil.pavel).

BTW, Diego will probably include information on proxy-maintainership to the devmanual so gentoo should finally get some documentation on this.

Pavel
Pavel on January 15th, 2010 2:53 am

Oh, one more thing: Markos said “… visit occasionally the bugzilla to find out if there are open bugs for your package …”. You don’t really have to if your e-mail address is assigned to the package in its metadata.xml file. In that way you will always receive e-mail whenever a bug for your package is submitted.
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