[Sugar-devel] Engineering Team

[Aleksey Lim]

Hi all,

(Just trying to summarize previous discussions, including recent one
on #sugar with some kind of motion)


= The problem =


Current situation with stuck patches queue is dangerous. Deployments
have to support their own big branches (branches, by themselves, is not
bad but big ones), at last I know about Dextrose. Such splitting is
really bad, e.g., people who test Sugar need to keep in mind that there
are upstream, OLPC, Dextrose, etc. Sugars.


= Engineering Team =


The Engineering Team is maintaining several core projects that influence
on the rest of Sugar:

* sugar-artwork
* sugar-datastore
* sugar-toolkit (would be good to merge it with sugar-base)
* sugar (Sugar shell, i.e., Sugar Window Manager)

The team consist of developers who:

* know code of core projects (some of them),
* have a time to take part in reviewing process,
* ready to close work with all other team members.

The area of responsibility of the Engineering Team is:

* take care of technical standards (API, DBus interface, etc),
* take part in reviewing patches for one of core projects,
* acking patches for one of core projects,
* take part in reviewing [[Features]].

What Engineering Team is not intended for:

* be a core team (in meaning of Sugar core), Sugar is not community
  around software but around educational ideas, so being a core is more
  for educators, designers, just open minded people [1]
* be a developers team, developing in sugar is not just developing 4
  projects, what is ok for these 4 projects might be bad for 99% of
  sugar - activities (at least activities should be 99%)
* would be good to not mix glucose with fructose activities, activities
  developing process is much obvious than glucose, lets use regular
  activities workflow for fructose
* should be good if Engineering Team will take care only of glucose
  releasing, not any activities. If SL needs releasing a product, would
  be better to leave it to Platform Team[2]

So, Engineering Team members might not take active part in coding itself
(this is more a task for [[Features]] developers) but just do engineering
work to support core projects. The only way when creative work appears
(for Engineering Team) is [[Features]].

The team members list might not be constant, if members don't have
enough time to take active part in regular work of the team, they need
request for exclusion to not mislead other participants.


= Review process =


One of two Engineering Team tasks - reviewing (the another one is
technical standards), might look like:

* patches that are intended for glucose (the rest of projects can follow
  the way which is most convenient for them) should be emailed to
  sugar-devel@ with CCing to engineering@
* to accept the patch, only one ack from Engineering Team is needed
  (including patches from Engineering Team members)
* obvious things should be taken into account like risks and discussing
  not trivial patches with other Engineering Team members
* reviewing [[Features]] is another case, it might require more close
  work of Engineering Team reviewers with feature developers


= Possible candidates to Engineering Team =


This is tops 10 of commits to glucose projects starting from 0.83.0
(when SL was formed).

sugar-base
commit 8282410627141a65d555d4b075497ae76b42a52b
Date:   Thu Aug 7 15:37:17 2008 +0200

18  Tomeu Vizoso 
12  Simon Schampijer 
6   Marco Pesenti Gritti 
3   Sascha Silbe 
2   Aleksey Lim 
1   Nirbheek Chauhan 
1   Kushal Das 
1   Bernie Innocenti 

sugar-artwork
commit 6ca1dddef325dc8a6b0639724dc0def601666c2b
Date:   Thu Aug 7 10:48:41 2008 +0200

31  Simon Schampijer 
14  Tomeu Vizoso 
14  Benjamin Berg 
11  Eben Eliason 
10  Marco Pesenti Gritti 
7   C. Scott Ananian 
3   Bernie Innocenti 
2   Aleksey Lim 

sugar-datastore
commit 721dc4e82515b00856cd591bc5e84bca4979ca76
Date:   Thu Aug 7 16:55:10 2008 +0200

99  Tomeu Vizoso 
37  Aleksey Lim 
14  Sascha Silbe 
6   Simon Schampijer 
5   Andrés Ambrois 
2   Bernie Innocenti 
1   Wade Brainerd 
1   Bert Freudenberg 

sugar-toolkit
commit c3873bfdcb78bf5e50568b591b3d9deec4d3d9db
Date:   Fri Aug 22 20:48:59 2008 +0200

160 Tomeu Vizoso 
101 Aleksey Lim 
85  Simon Schampijer 
41  Marco Pesenti Gritti 
13  Sayamindu Dasgupta 
12  Sascha Silbe 
12  Benjamin Berg 
8   Daniel Drake 
5   David Farning 
4   Khaled Hosny 

sugar
commit 546ddf99dece09fcbff4c8730df3f92923d7ef6b
Date:   Thu Aug 7 17:58:29 2008 +0200

419 Tomeu Vizoso 
234 Simon Schampijer 
199 Marco Pesenti Gritti 
129 Aleksey Lim 
36  Sayamindu Dasgupta 
24  Daniel Drake 
23  Guillaume Desmottes 
21  Eben Eliason 
14  Sascha Silbe 
13  C. Scott Ananian 


= Motion =


This is *not* closed topic or my authoritative decision, just being
a sugar-datastore maintainer and a person from commits top, I've:

* create engineering team[3] on git.sl.o
* added there sugar-datastore project
* created engineering@
* will seek for existed sugar-datastore patches to review/accept them

People from the commits top (and any other skilled sugar developers)
who are agree with Engineering Team purposes, are welcome to do the same.

Any help with this topic is welcome.


[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Alsroot/Sugar_Architecture#Core_Team
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Alsroot/Sugar_Architecture#Platform_Team
[3] http://git.sugarlabs.org/+engineering

-- 
Aleksey