Distributions

Gentoo debates recruitment schemes

Cultivating contributors is a tricky endeavor; large projects like Linux distributions need to add developers, testers, packagers, and more on an ongoing basis. But recruiting involves more than extending an invitation; training new talent on the ins-and-outs of the development process is vital, as is deftly handling volunteers that don't quite have their act together. Debian, for instance, has a multi-step process for joining that requires both contribution and a recommendation from existing members.

Gentoo has long taken the recruiting game seriously as well, but it recently decided to shut down its developer-recruitment web application, and return to its previous method of email-submitted "quizzes." Opinion is divided as to which direction the recruitment process should take; the distribution has historically found success with its structured process, pairing new volunteers with mentors for training. But if the mechanics of maintaining that process become a burden, it can drive off new contributors and mentors.

In the past, the Gentoo recruitment training process centered around a set of quizzes that each new recruit had to complete successfully before getting commit privileges. There were two quizzes: one for those who would be working with the distribution's ebuild build system or Portage tree, and another for those who would be working on infrastructure and other non-build components. Both quizzes include a mix of policy and technical questions, requiring (sometimes lengthy) essay-style answers. For example, the ebuild quiz asks:

in the "Organizational structure" section, and:

in the "Ebuild technical" section. The recruit would send the completed quiz to his or her mentor and, upon receiving a satisfactory grade, would advance to the next step: opening a recruitment "bug" to track the recruit's progress, which eventually culminates in account setup.

The term "quiz" might be slightly confusing to some who associate the word with brief and/or quick tests. In Gentoo's case, the recruit could take as much time as necessary to complete the questions, and might be asked by the mentor to try again through several iterations. On the plus side, this technique emphasizes letting the new developer get familiar with the documentation and the distribution's way of doing things. But it also led to new recruits taking months or even years to complete the quizzes, often while they continued to contribute back in "unofficial" ways.

The web application (at recruiting.gentoo.org) was deployed in 2010, with the goal of streamlining the process by storing the questions and answers online. Mentors could provide feedback through the application, without juggling email threads. But the web application has not proven so useful in practice: it is buggy, it has UI issues, it runs on an outdated version of Rails, and there is insufficient developer-power in the project to fix it up. All of those factors combined to convince the recruiters to move back to the old-style, email-driven quiz process.

Markos Chandras from the Gentoo Recruiters team announced the decision on July 14, saying that new recruits (not including those who have already started using the web application) should use the old quizzes instead. "We understand that quizzes is not an ideal way to 'hire' people either, but they worked ok for all these years and it is the only alternative we have at the moment." Chandras added that hopefully a future Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project will be able to improve the application.

But not everyone agreed that the old-style quizzes worked acceptably, or that the web application was the only alternative to consider. Ben de Groot said that the time involved takes away from time the new recruit could contribute to Gentoo:

De Groot proposed improving the wiki documentation to cover the quiz material, and having mentors walk their recruits through the documentation while simultaneously helping them learn development work. Alternatively, he said, mentors could assign tasks for recruits to complete. Chandras replied that the quizzes cover a specific set of material to ensure consistency between mentors, and that doing away with them would necessitate someone else monitoring the mentors to ensure they cover the proper work. On the other hand, he did like the idea of improving the wiki, and suggested that the post-quiz review steps could be simplified, particularly if a recruit has already been contributing.

Rich Freeman expressed surprise at the lengths of time taken by some recruits, but agreed that the quizzes have weaknesses, saying "I did struggle because policies were not always spelled out" and "sometimes the indirectness of some of the questions was frustrating," but that he completed his quiz in eight hours, and learned a lot in the process. He also suggested improving documentation, in particular by creating step-by-step tutorials for ebuild, which could guide new recruits through learning the system (in contrast to the existing documentation, which is predominantly reference material).

Several people responded that the absolute time required to complete the quizzes was not the issue, rather it was finding the free time to devote to the process amidst all other responsibilities (including Gentoo contributions). Peter Stuge commented, jokingly, that "the idiots that the quizzes are designed to keep out can spend two (or four/eight if they need) days to pass anyway with a little dedication, while less idiotic idiots such as perhaps myself need years because we're doing whatever work as opposed to learning foundation bylaws by heart."

Freeman also speculated in several messages on the impact the recruitment process has on the overall Gentoo culture, apart from the method used to indoctrinate new developers. On one hand, he suggested that the need to ensure a training regimen stemmed from technical choices like using CVS (where commit access is required). Using Git instead would alleviate some of the concern about adding new developers, because they could still do useful work in their own trees. More developers with more freedom to improve packages, he said, "would be a good thing. The all-or-nothing model too often turns out to be nothing."

On the other hand, Freeman argued that the non-technical topics in the quizzes — such as learning to work within teams, ask questions, and build consensus — are more important in the long term:

Freeman may have summed up the feelings of many Gentoo developers: the specifics of the training process are less important than the fact that is it deliberate and guided by active mentors and recruiters, because the end goal is to integrate the new developers into the Gentoo community — not to train them on a particular suite of tools. On that front, the web application still has its share of fans. Theo Chatzimichos said he prefers it to the email-driven quizzes because it simplifies keeping track of recruits' answers. Chatzimichos said he mentors two or three recruits at a time, and proposed putting out a call for volunteers to revamp the web application, while making sure to not let the web application get out-of-sync with the quizzes.

In an email, Chandras said that Gentoo averages 10 to 15 recruits per year. That may not be many when compared to large distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora, but in a sense it only makes the recruitment process more critical. It is clear from the discussion that neither the old email-driven quizzes nor the recent web application quite meet everyone's needs — but at least the recruiters and the mentors are committed to sticking with the process even in spite of its awkward points.

Comments (31 posted)

Brief items

Distribution quote of the week

-- Rich Freeman

Comments (none posted)

GNU Linux-libre 3.5-gnu: Free and a half

The 3.5-gnu Linux-libre kernel has been released. The Linux-libre kernel meets the Free Software Foundation's criteria for free software and is suitable for distributions that aim to include only free software.

Comments (90 posted)

Slackware 14.0 beta

The July 22, 2012 entry in the slackware-current changelog (i386, x86_64) has the announcement that Slackware 14.0 has reached beta. "Howdy! Lots of shiny stuff here, including the long awaited Xfce 4.10! Thanks to Robby Workman for the initial set of build scripts, and lots of testing (plus some very helpful notes about things such as the proper build order). I'm calling this a beta (finally!), and it's really very close to what we expect to release. Test away."

Comments (3 posted)

Distribution News

Fedora

Fedora Summer of Open Hardware and Fun Sweepstakes

The Fedora project has launched a sweepstakes for Fedora contributors with Open Hardware for prizes.

Full Story (comments: none)

Newsletters and articles of interest

Distribution newsletters

• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 466 (July 23)
• Maemo Weekly News (July 23)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 275 (July 22)

Comments (none posted)

Bergeron: The Future of FUDCons

On her blog, Fedora project leader Robyn Bergeron considers a different approach for the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon). In the post, she suggests having a single FUDCon per year (rather than four), timing the conference so that it works well with the release schedule, and renaming (and repurposing) it to "DoCon". "Make this event be focused on the “do-ers” – and not the users. I mentioned previously in this post that it does not make the best use of our face-to-face bandwidth, and I’m sticking to that — and moreover, I think that trying to plan a parallel “user track” just winds up taking people away from getting things done. This is not a “we don’t care about the users” statement in any way, so don’t jump down my throat. But I think that mixing up the event tends to leave casual users/potential users/non-contributor users unsure about what to attend, and I haven’t seen any evidence on any large scale that users magically become contributors at a FUDCon. And there is NO REASON IN THE UNIVERSE why we can’t come up with a type of event that costs significantly less to host, requires fewer numbers of contributors to attend, and is geared solely towards users/potential users/potential contributors, and can be made repeatable in many places. The fact that a FUDCon in Pune can draw in a crowd of 500+ shows that there is absolutely interest."

Comments (9 posted)

HealthCheck Mandriva - Rebooting the company (The H)

Over at The H, Richard Hillesley has an in-depth look at the history and future of Mandriva, both the company and the distribution. "Mandriva is hoping that 'contributors will come to the new distribution because it will be a fun place to be. The new distribution will bring very much the same care for the end user that the Mandriva line of distributions have always brought, and will hope to be as technically advanced as Fedora,' says [Charles H.] Schulz, 'and this will be exciting and new.' Mandriva the company will contribute but does not expect to be in charge. 'We're not going to hog the governance. We won't be the ones that decide,' says Schulz. There has already been a community proposal for hosting the servers, and Mandriva and Rosa Labs will also contribute some servers, 'but we prefer to lead by example rather than domination.'"

Comments (none posted)

New desktops for Fedora

The H looks at the inclusion of the Cinnamon desktop in the Fedora 17 repositories. "Now that Muffin and the Cinnamon package have been approved, the desktop has been included in the Fedora 17 standard repositories; from there, it can be installed using a command such as yum install cinnamon and then selected when signing in via GDM or another login manager. Provided that the desktop continues to be maintained, it will likely also be part of Fedora 18, which is scheduled to be released this autumn." The article also mentions that there is an add-on repository for Ubuntu's Unity desktop.

OMG! Ubuntu! warns that installing Unity on top of Fedora 17 "will replace some core GNOME components with Unity-compatible versions" and should be done with caution.

Comments (none posted)

Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
Next page: Development>>