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

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Pablo Flores
<pflores at activitycentral.com> wrote:
> 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?

What is the rationale for this position?

> 2. In AC we're a bit behind in having our developments upstreamed (I asked
> silbe to summarize Dextrose status, as he recently did).

Great to see that report. Bernie forwarded it to sugar-devel where it
will undoubtedly reach more developers.

> 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).

+1 Sooner is almost always better.

> ** 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.

I assume that some of this already happens. I have gotten great
feedback from Sascha over the years.

> ** 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.

Hard to argue with 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.

 It is not always clear from the outside who is responsible what; in
any case, this seems to be an internal AC matter.

> Do you agree with these observations? Looking forward for your feedback!
>
> Regards,
> Pablo Flores
> activitycentral.com
>
>
>
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regards.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org