[yocto-ab] Member involvement in the core of the project

[Richard Purdie]

One issue I've been giving some thought to is involvement of members
and their developers in the core engineering of the project. There are
several kinds of activity people undertake:

* Ownership of areas, reviewing and handling patches there
* Stable branch maintainership
* Bug fixing
* Recipe ownership and maintenance
* SWAT team (owns handling autobuilder monitoring/reporting)

We've a lot of interesting process pieces which I'd really like to
expose to a wider audience as I think people don't realise the power of
some of the automated tooling or testing infrastructure we have.

One area that springs to mind is recipe maintainership. You can view
the automated reporting we have at http://recipes.yoctoproject.org/rrs/
recipes/2.2/M4/ and this tells us who maintains a given OE-Core recipe,
what the current version is and what the current upstream release is
at.

I'm sure that the role of recipe maintainer is not as well documented
as perhaps it should be and this is something we can fix comparatively
easily. It boils down to being responsible for updating to new versions
when they become available and helping fix bugs in particular recipes
if any arise. It also carries a responsibility to improve testing, be
it by adding ptest to recipes if appropriate, or helping test recipes
through our other automated test means. I'd like to suggest that member
organisations each pick up responsibility for at least some handful of
recipes.

We have a comparatively large test matrix and a level of test
automation which I'm proud of. I'd love to see people learning about
our tools (recipe reporting, devtool, etc.) and our testing techniques
(ptest, oe-selftest, testimage, etc.) and then taking these into other
layers and places.

Members technically are required to provide a development resource who
works on the core of the project and we've traditionally not enforced
this. Something like recipe maintainership could be an easily tracked
and comparatively fair way of indicating involvement and support of the
project and also would then encourage the above transfer of technology
from the core layer into the wider ecosystem.

I was planning to raise this and discuss this further at the advisory
board meeting but this would seem like a good place/time to start a
discussion.

Thoughts/feedback/comments welcome.

I'm particularly open to other ideas on how we get members more
involved.

Cheers,

Richard