[Sugar-devel] Have we achieved consensus among activite Sugar developers?

[James Cameron]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:28:35AM -0500, David Farning wrote:
> Have we achieved general consensus that the three phase approach I
> proposed earlier this week has the potential for establishing a
> mutually beneficial relationship while progressively rebuilding trust
> on both sides?

I got lost in the discussion again; I couldn't see how your three
phase approach answered Walter's question about your perception that
Sugar Labs is not acting transparently.  ;-)

Regarding your need to rebuild trust on both sides; perhaps a
quantitative approach; you could list the areas and extents in which
Sugar Labs trusts Activity Central and Activity Central trusts Sugar
Labs now.  e.g. feature discussion, design review, patch review, go
no-go release decisions, support for released code.  Gain general
agreement.  Then do a diff against past and future.  But this begins
to sound like a developers' social contract, and not specific to
Activity Central.

My gut feel is that Sugar Labs treats all technical contributions
fairly, regardless of funding source, and that promising funding gains
no advantage except better phrasing of the responses; 'cause the
funding bias is better understood to be present.

However, looking carefully at your three phase approach on 29th
October:

1.  you are funding work;

fine by me, thanks, expect some responses to these developers to be
coloured by the awareness of funding,

2.  you want more discussion about features and whether features as
built are ready for release;

fine by me, this is no material change to current process,

3.  you speculate that there is a conflict between supporting existing
deployments and developing the next releases;

this doesn't fit with me, the two workloads are very different vectors
in the phase space of possible work, and Sugar Labs primarily operates
on only one of the vectors, solving support problems in the next
release.

--

Disclosure statement: the author provides consulting to OLPCA, and
OLPCA does benefit from Sugar Labs releases.  The author receives no
direct funding from Sugar Labs or any deployment.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/