Can we document the development workflow in the devmanual? Currently it is undocumented and thus people take different approaches to it; some use emerge (which is slow and broken), some use ebuild (which doesn't check dependencies, thus yield invalid bugs and time lost debugging) and others use wrappers or other magic to accomplish what they want (which can have other deficiencies). Besides that, tools like 'eshowkw' could be highlighted, as well as certain scripts used to bump ebuilds, run readelf over the installed files, etc... Establishing a workflow as well as bringing together scripts into a tool can help new developers (and long time developers too) increase the quality of their work.
Are you proposing enforcing a standard workflow for everyone?
No, just documenting a common way to do it; because now we don't document anything at all which makes people use a wrong workflow that causes trouble, it can also be very welcome for new developers to get an idea of which things are commonly done as well as start of from an approach that's deemed good. In no way this should enforce the workflow; if individual people want to do things differently (while keeping a similar amount of quality), they can do so. (Note: Some parts of the workflow are however already enforced policies, like repoman and updating the ChangeLog; but they are shattered around the policy)
OK, that's good to know. Did you have a particular workflow in mind? It could be interesting to survey developers to see what everyone does, I'm sure there are some good undocumented tricks out there.
No progress, therefore closing. Feel free to reopen with a patch attached.