Doing stabilisations and keywording of packages is an essential part of keeping the quality of the distribution. This needs some dedicated people who check that packages work on a given architecture. Most in Gentoo are kept working by a small group of persons, some even have only one active developer on it (true for ppc64, hppa or m68k). Many people don't care about those three because users are scarce out there, but two architectures are essential, because they are wide-spread: amd64 and x86. The first had some issues in the last three years, but now the support is going well, because of some new additions to the team or regained motivation (ssuominen, maekke, hwoarang and pacho to name a few).
x86 on the other hand is handled by maekke and myself, armin76 sometimes helps out. About a year ago, we were down to 30 to 50 open stabilisation/keywording requests, while now we are lucky if we get down to 60, usually we are above 100. This is not a good situation, because of lost overview critical stabilisations may not done in a timely manner. There are several causes of this problem: Firstly, at least I cannot dedicate as much time as I would like. Secondly, some teams and developers think that every minor revision of a package needs to be stabilised after 30 days, no matter if the previous version has just been gone to the stable tree. Stabilising a package is not just a compile-check! At least the problem can be avoided by just ignoring those requests for a while until the next requests comes in and invalidates the older one.
Why I wrote all this? In the long-run the x86 needs some fresh blood. Although the architecture will die out, it is still heavily used and netbooks are new consumers of it. Also there is the embedded world which sees some old processors still around. So we are looking for new members, being it existing developers who wish to join or users willing to help. We are open for recruitment if you prove reliable or you stay an architecture tester who reports on stabilisation requests that the package works as expected on x86. We don't expect that you do stabilisations for ten hours every day, but regularly and over a long time-frame, so this is an excellent opportunity to enter the Gentoo developer community. For all the glory details, see our FAQ, ask me directly be email or peek into the IRC channel #gentoo-x86 on Freenode.
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