C1pher’s Adopt a Package Program (henceforth known as CAPP) aims to help reduce the number of maintainer-needed packages in the Portage Tree. As you can see in this (rather lengthy) thread on gentoo-dev ML, we have a lot of maintainer-needed (from now on, m-n) packages that could really use some adoptive devs.

M-N packages are hard to deal with for a lot of reasons. Ideally we could very easily just punt anything that was m-n from the tree and not worry about it, however, as you can see from that thread, that is anything but the case. Just because something is m-n does *not* mean that it’s broken, or useless, or anything else. What it *does* mean is that when issues show up, it could sit broken for months without anyone looking at it. That is a QA nightmare as well. We don’t like broken packages. We want the tree to be nice and working. However, if that m-n is useful to a fair number of users, or is depended on by other packages, it can lead to headaches… and angered users… leading in more headaches.

Soooooo, hence this post. As much as I would love to adopt all 675 or so packages that are looking for a home, I do *not* have *that* much free time. I’m a geek sure, but I do have a life. So, instead of watching them flounder, I’m offering myself up as a Proxy-Maintainer to anyone would like to adopt a package or 10 from the list. I am very easy to reach via e-mail or IRC, so poke me there and we will work something out.

If you’re curious what packages need some lovin’, here you are. Click away! Cantidates for adoption.