[Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Activities added to GithHub

[James Cameron]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 11:48:16AM +0800, Tony Anderson wrote:
> 1. The original repository is ASLO.

No, the originals were mostly on laptop.org and on developer web
sites, including Gitorious and GitHub.

> The git.sugarlabs.org was added later.

No, the Sugar Labs Gitorious instance was set up in 2009 before ASLO
was brought up later that year.

But ASLO is an app store, not version control.

> The intent, as I understand it, is to have the master source code
> under git version control on github as a replacement for
> git.sugarlabs.org.

No, the intent, as I understand it, is to move any still-remaining
activities from git.sugarlabs.org to github.com so that
git.sugarlabs.org can be shut down.

> The git record of the programming change from version to version
> should be invaluable in understanding how the activity evolved.

No, not really.  What is valuable is the commit history, not the
change from each release version.

I think you might be thinking that "version control" has a direct
relationship with release version numbers.  It doesn't.

Perhaps "revision control" is the better term for what we use Git for.

> Out of 71 repositories, 47 were not
> duplicates and so development history has been captured.

A history was captured, but it was not the commit history, so
information was destroyed.

> I assume you know that ASLO is short for
> activities.sugarlabs.org. It is not source code.

No, you're wrong.  ASLO is a web application with source code.  Go
look at it http://github.com/sugarlabs/aslo

> Yes, the original idea of ASLO is that individuals would create and
> submit activities. The permission schemes does not permit community
> maintenance.

The ASLO permissions scheme is written in source code of ASLO and
lists people as activity maintainers.

I think your main problem is that on GitHub is much easier to add new
users than it is on ASLO; because Aleksey and others who operate ASLO
are less available than GitHub.

> I believe the goal is to create a repository for each activity on
> ASLO so that the community can undertake further development and
> maintenance.

I think you're trying to substitute a more accessible permission
scheme by defaulting to GitHub.

> 2. Certainly if the community decides this was a bad idea, it can be
> easily corrected. However, this deserves discussion more than rants.

Indeed, right back at you.

> 3. There was a lot of discussion of this issue in connection with
> GCI 2016 where making these ports was the main task. This is when
> most of the 137 activities were added to the github/sugarlabs.

Interesting, thanks.  That may explain something; any discussion that
happened during GCI 2016 inside the Google Code-In framework won't
have captured opinions of those not engaged in GCI.

> I fully agree with the concern about dilution - I believe we should
> have a separate organizational github (e.g sugar-activities) for the
> activities.

Huh?  You have misunderstood my earlier mail; concern about the dilution
of the sugarlabs GitHub organisation by having a sugar-activities
organisation.

> However, the current course was adopted over a year ago and has not
> been further discussed.
> 
> The comment that everything  done was mechanical and unqualified is
> spot on. My faux pas with the duplicates is clear evidence of my
> being unqualified. I hope to prove educable.
> 
> 4. Here are some issues that deserve thought and comment.
> 
> In ASLO, the submitter specifies the license. The submitter is the
> assumed copyright owner. So can we assign a different license on
> github. Unfortuately the submitters choice of license is not
> displayed on ASLO but I have to believe it was recorded in the mysql
> database.

Yes, the license is not displayed to the app store user, but that's
peripheral to whether a license is declared in the source code in the
bundle.  You can review the ASLO source code to see it was recorded.

> I believe the activity.info should include the developer, summary,
> description, and license as well as a link to the repository on
> github plus any other valuable information displayed on ASLO. In
> this way, the ASLO site can display information provided and
> maintainable by the developer. This requires revisiting the current
> definition of activity.info. Perhaps the Readme file could contain
> this supplemental information to be added to the bundle by
> bundlebuilder.

That seems an unrelated issue, and I don't think this thread is the
place to bring it up.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/