[Sugar-devel] Sugar upstreaming strategy and Activity Central upstreaming work

[Pablo Flores]

I'd like to openly discuss some aspects of Sugar upstreaming strategy and
the role that AC is playing on it and may play in the future.

As I understand it, there are 2 Sugar core maintainers: Sascha Silbe
(silbe) and Simon Schampijer (erikos). Both have been working very hard for
Sugar for a long time, reaching to good results.

Silbe's work in the last more than 1 year has been paid by AC. He has been
dedicating an important portion of his working time on upstreaming all kind
of patches submitted by sugar developers all around. That's a contribution
that AC has been giving to the community, as well as OLPC is making theirs
by having erikos hired.

In this moment, there are 3 main concerns I have related to this topic, and
I'd like to know the community developers thoughts about them, looking at
the future:
1. Many community members I talked to agreed that it would be better having
only one single maintainer, if possible working full time on it. What do
you think about that?
2. In AC we're a bit behind in having our developments upstreamed (I asked
silbe to summarize Dextrose status, as he recently did). So, in addition to
needing to put an important amount of work on it, we're trying to have
better working processes for upstreaming:
** Sending patches to sugar-devel as early as possible (if incomplete, as
RFC for a first round of reviews).
** Having AC developers dedicating some hours for reviewing and testing
patches submitted by community developers, participating on the lists and
on the Development Team meetings.
** Having AC developers trained for collaborating with and contributing to
upstream themselves as much as possible. I asked silbe to help our
developers on that.
3. All this requires additional resources from AC, particularly silbe's
time, which is not easy to find with all the work he already has. However,
if we unilaterally take a decision on that (for instance, asking him to
dedicate xx hours of his time for dextrose upstreaming, or on training our
developers) we could be harming Sugar maintenance work. So, in my opinion,
the current scheme for maintaining Sugar may not be sustainable in the mid
term.

Do you agree with these observations? Looking forward for your feedback!

Regards,
Pablo Flores
activitycentral.com
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