An easy way to assist us

March 4, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo · 11 Comments

Well, today I am gonna focus on two different types of packages. Those who never had a maintainer and those abandoned by their initial maintainers.

Looking through bugzilla, you might notice that some of the bus are assigned to maintainer-wanted herd. This means that those packages are seeking for a gentoo developer or a gentoo-user ( acting as proxy-maintainer ) to take care of them and push them on tree or Sunrise. So if you file a bug for a new ebuild, we will probably assign it to that herd and wait until somebody picks it. Personally, I go through that list once a while and pick up interesting packages but I don’t know if the rest of the devs are in the same path. If you feel like a package is really cool and we should really have it on tree, feel free to write an ebuild for it and then commit it on Sunrise or poke me and I will commit it on tree (after we review it) and I will add you as proxy-maintainer

The maintainer-needed packages are orphan packages on tree. This is because their initial developer got bored taking care of them or because this developer has been retired. Hence nobody is taking care of them, nobody bumps them, nobody fixes the various bugs which pop up from time to time. Again, I go through that list and either remove them on behalf of treecleaner project or fix them on behalf of QA project. So the question is:

Can you help? If you file a bug on a maintainer-needed package, most likely nobody will fix it. But if you attach a patch that actually fixes the problem, then a guy from treecleaners/QA project will probably pop up and commit your patch. Congruts, you saved a package from being removed. Simple?

In order to help you, I will give you the two URLs from gentoo bugzilla I use to track maintainer-needed and -wanted bugs

* maintainer-needed

* maintainer-wanted

Happy bug fixing

Tags: bugs, ebuild, Gentoo