Hi Lamar,
On 01/05/2011 03:23 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
I would, however, add an item to your list, having said that: (d) have sufficient and reliable time availability to help. Although that is somewhat implied by your item (c) above, I believe anyone that plans to really get their hands dirty and help out needs a realistic expectation of the time commitment that is involved (when I maintained the PostgreSQL RPMs, I found that, even with just one package set to maintain, the time commitment was substantial, and was mostly spent doing user support....).
The time concern is an interesting one. My commitment average is between 25 to 30 hrs a week, pretty much every week of the year.
But step aside from that idea for a minute. The way things look from my end of the spectrum is if someone was to not take on a single package, but an entire role. Pgsql would be a good example, another might be LAMP or 'ruby'. As an example, Pasi is looking at the Virt stack. In some cases the role would be a single package, eg. Akemi's work with the plus kernel.
Coming back to your question : if I was to pick a number out of thin air, based on weather conditions and what I *feel*, 5 - 8 hrs a week during 'not release time' would / should be plenty for someone looking at a few packages - remember that given the upstream code churn rate, its not many weeks where one would need to look at updates. And package-set movement is purely limited to new-point-release time anyway, so is not something one would need to worry about too much. Also, checking email more than once a day might be a good idea ( and keeping up with atleast the mailing lists ).
While we are on the subject - its worth noting that a *lot* of the dev / admin / infra / management stuff around CentOS is done on IRC, not in the lists. So anyone wanting to get involved should really consider parking there ( the not-for-end-user channels are extremely low traffic ).
Just my thoughts.
- KB