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

[akuster]

On 09/30/2016 06:17 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> 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)
Not sure if these qualify:
* QA
* Doc's
* Monthly tech meeting
* New features
* RFT ( request for testing) when we do major package version updates 
like python or gcc

> 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.

Isn't this some of the value of the Yocto project? I am hoping we start 
promoting the Projects value a bit more.

- Armin

> One area that springs to mind is recipe maintainership. You can view
> the automated reporting we have athttp://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