[Sugar-devel] Adding committers on gitorious (was: Re: [PATCH] Remove nbsp chars from the html string before parsing)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 12:51, Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco at marcopg.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>>> Yeah, I think we need to look into merging core in a single repository.
>>
>> At the end it's basically the same problem we find again and again: we
>> spend days-person discussing some big changes, eventually may reach an
>> agreement (or not), then nobody finds time to actually do the work.
>
> I understand your frustration but we cannot give up on the inability
> to make big changes. It's a normal situation when a projects gets
> mature (see the the struggle GNOME had to come up with a plan for
> 3.0), but it's even more critical for us because we have been forced
> to stabilize a code base which was not ready to be.

Well, I think we are still able to push a few big changes per release,
just not everything people wish. As you say, our fundations aren't
really stable yet.

> I was just throwing in the idea here. I will bother you further only
> once I have a realistic plan in mind (and confidence in the ability to
> execute it with our limited resources) :)

Sorry if I sounded harsh, I wanted to explain why some "reforms" are
not going forward yet even if people agree are necessary.

>> It happened with the code review process and I see very well it
>> happening here because it would require coordination with packagers,
>> updating lots of wiki pages, etc.
>
> That's actually the other thing I'm planning to look into. Maybe I'm
> mistake but I feel we are stuck with a review process most of the
> existing contributors are unhappy with. I can work on a formal
> proposal and try to reach consensus, if that's what is missing...

Sounds great, though I have felt that there was a bit of misdirected
frustration during that conversation.

>>> Not even so much because of the maintenance burden, but because we really need to get to the point where building Sugar on a recent distribution is just cloning one git repository and running "./configure; make install".
>>
>> I'm afraid this won't be always possible no matter what we do because
>> distros such as Fedora are willing to drop stuff that doesn't conform
>> to GNOME 3, while Debian behaves more conservatively.
>>
>> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2010-August/006407.html
>
> Can you elaborate here? In very simplistic terms, what I'm thinking is
> that Sugar gets ported to GNOME 3, and then it works both on Fedora
> and Debian. I'm sure I'm missing something :)

If distros drop a platform dependency in the same release where the
replacement lands (what happens with gnome-python2-desktop in Fedora
14), it means that everybody needs to build that dependency until they
update to that release.

Moreover, if some distros only include the new dependency at a later
release (as with Ubuntu Maverick and Gtk3), contributors running one
of those distros need to build more stuff for longer.

We can reduce the harm by keeping PPA-like repos for the distros that
need it (what the telepathy guys do for Ubuntu), but then someone
needs to do that work.

In summary, I'm able to see the importance of making as easy as
possible running latest sugar on all distros, but I'm afraid it's one
more goal we want to attain but don't know how to resource.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Cheers,
> Marco
>