[Sugar-devel] review process follow-up.

[David Farning]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> thanks a lot for putting some new energy on this discussion, there's
> certainly more opportunities for us in revising this process.

Certainly, and I will do my best to insure that the process revision
is driven by an increase in useful patches which need to processed

> For background, Bernie and me talked on the phone last week and it
> helped a lot in aligning our positions on this. When we get the
> community team up and running I will propose that when a discussion
> gets a bit too heated, that someone proposes the interested parties to
> have a conf call.
>
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 16:00, David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would like to invite input on the new process that Tomeu and Bernie
>> have been developing.  I am specifically interested in see how Sugar
>> Labs, OLPC, and third parties such as Activity Central can work
>> together most effectively.
>>
>> Admittedly we are causing a disruption, hopefully one which will cause
>> a net improvement.
>> 1.  Value and review of patches.  The task we are doing are directly
>> driven by deployments.  As such we need to deal with version issues.
>> Most of the deployments are using and will continue to use .82/4 for
>> the near future.  Paraguay is leading a push to stabilize on .88 by
>> August of 2010.
>>
>> One of the mantras of Activity Central is upstream. We don't have our
>> own mailing lists or bug trackers.  This begs the question of dealing
>> with versions.  I am encouraging, but not requiring, that patches fix
>> the issue for the version of sugar the customer uses plus the current
>> develop version if applicable.
>
> About the specific issue of stable branches, my recommendation is that
> they are maintained by someone a bit closer to downstreams and that
> there's a strong requirement for only pushing backported bugfixes and,
> occasionally, features.

Yes, I am not asking of expecting Sugar Labs to carry they burden of
backporting.  That is role is often played by a downstream
distributor.

>> 2. Maintainer-ship.  To avoid possible conflicts of interest, ie
>> ramming ideas down the communitie's throat, I have avoided directly
>> engaging key developers, comitters, and maintainer.  For this to work
>> we must gain credibility as useful participants.  If and only if is
>> acceptable to the current development team, I would like to make an
>> effort to increase the number of activities maintained by Activity
>> Central.
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure this decision belongs to the development team. What
> if AC starts by taking a couple of the several orphaned activities
> that are seeing more requests and we see how it works?

The tricky thing here is that as a company, we are only interested in
a few high value activities.  So this is a place where crowding out
_can_ occur if we are not careful.

> In a couple of
> months we should have the community and deployment teams running,
> which could be more appropriate forums to discuss this.

I support the idea of a stronger emphasis on community engagement via
a community team.

I am a bit more hesitant about a deployment team.  The needs of
deployments are very specific and hard for a upstream community to
effectively meet.  Rather than working top down, it might be more
effective to work bottom up by focusing on helping projects like
ceibaljam and Ole Nepal push their deployments driven innovations
upstream.

david

> We still need to see how we can improve the process so that code gets
> in faster and new contributors find a more dynamic community, will be
> proposing a few ideas in a bit.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> david
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>