Ah, what a hectic time we're in.
For those of you who don't monitor my every move (and why haven't you started?), there was some recent news involving my life:
Yes. That means I'm now the "big hat" in the ArchLinux world. It's a mixed blessing - as a whole I think we both need and fear this sort of thing.
But, that's how life works. When life gives you lemons, and all that. I'm here right now to give a sort of informal roadmap to anyone who may be watching. I figure this will percolate out to the community at some point, but this way I can keep the vision small and open for discussion.
I plan on making some changes soon to the way ArchLinux is run as a whole, and I guess I'll kinda give a preview here.
See, something like this is easy when you have 3 or 4 people, with similar goals and ideals. But when you hit 30 or so developers, that's when you run ashore. What you need, at that point, is something to keep everyone in line, something to keep everyone from going off on different tangents.
You need Process.
I know. It's a frightening word for anyone who has ever worked in a heavy corporate environment. But we need it. The more hands we have doing different things, the more opportunity we have to introduce human error.
This process begins with the new [testing] repo policy. That is, if a package is in the core repository, it must always go to the testing repo and be "signed off" by another developer. It is more important to ensure the stability of the core repo than to have updates minutes after they are released.
In the coming weeks, I am also planning on defining a set of "roles" or "teams" for our developers. Right now, everyone is just a generic "I do everything" guy. Again, this works when you are small, but doesn't work anymore. Everyone can't and shouldn't do everything.
So what we gain is a set of specialists instead of a group of generalists.
Instead of "I work on ArchLinux", it's "I work on
More to come, don't worry.