Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

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Semi-official answer since this isn't an area I work on directly:

In general, the differences between Tier 2 and Tier 1 are:

1. Get tests running on every commit.

2. Gate building on those tests passing.

The first is a technical/money issue, the latter is a social issue. That is, getting all tests working is technical, being able to afford running them on every commit is monetary, but gating builds on failures on a platform is an issue of "who is responsible for making sure things stay passing."

Given that we run these tests on every commit, in some sense, it would be the PR author's job, but if they get stuck, we need someone who's able to help them fix that. That is the hardest part of moving from tier 2 to tier 1 in my personal opinion. Who is that person? What happens if they drop off the project?

>Given that we run these tests on every commit, in some sense, it would be the PR author's job, but if they get stuck, we need someone who's able to help them fix that. That is the hardest part of moving from tier 2 to tier 1 in my personal opinion. Who is that person? What happens if they drop off the project?

I would have liked to volunteer as the kind of person that would investigate issues for the FreeBSD platform but as I said, both my skills and my time are limited to the extent that they might not be sufficient.

As for what happens if the person responsible for this drops off the project, I think the solution to that is not so complicated; demote the platform back to tier 2 until someone else (if anyone ever) steps up to take over the responsibility.

Yeah, I think that policy is sound, it's just something we haven't actually done yet, so there are inevitable kinks to work out :)

I expect that your situation isn't uncommon, maybe the solution is two or three people rather than one. Raises that bar though...

>maybe the solution is two or three people rather than one

Sounds like a good idea to me. Personally I would be willing to work with a couple of other volunteers as long as we were able to get along.

One of the kinks is the longevity guarantee -- we kinda-sorta guarantee that Tier 1 platforms will "never" go away, but we can't as easily do that for a community thing. AIUI Tier 1 is something permanent that you can rely on always existing in the future.

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