GLEP: 41 Title: Making Arch Testers official Gentoo Staff Version: $Revision: 1.1 $ Last-Modified: $Date: 2005/09/15 21:01:51 $ Author: Simon Stelling , Status: Draft Type: Standards Track Content-Type: text/x-rst Created: 7-Sep-2005 Post-History: 15-Sep-2005 Abstract ======== Arch Testers should be treated as official Gentoo staff. Motivation ========== Since Mike Doty (kingtaco) created an Arch Tester (AT) project in January 2005 to reduce the developer's load and the amount of open keywording bugs for the amd64 porting team, many users have volunteered to become ATs. They are doing a fair share of everyday's work to keep the amd64 and ppc trees up to date. While they spent many hours and even had to pass the staff quiz, they are currently not recognized as official members of Gentoo. Specification ============= ATs should basically be treated as staff. This includes the following changes to the current situation: - Get a @gentoo.org email address - Get read-only access to the gentoo-x86 repository Additionally, the mentoring period should be shortened to two weeks if an AT wants to take the end quiz to become a developer, assuming he has been AT for at least two weeks. The amd64 porting team has handled situations like this for a while and only made positive experiences. Also, the idea of an arch tester as a trustful user who is able to test critical changes (such as hard masked software branches), could be expanded to other herd. These 'ATs' wouldn't be called arch testers as the 'arch' is irritating, instead, herd tester (HT) could be used. As arch testers (and herd testers) become official staff, they should be handled by DevRel. Backwards Compatibility ======================= All current active arch testers should be migrated to staff. Copyright ========= This document has been placed in the public domain.