On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, David Dawes wrote: >I read your article and saw it the same way. I think that this >is typical of you, you speak out of both sides of your mouth. >You are saying a lot of things in this thread differently than >you did in that diary entry of yours.
You're certainly entitled to your own opinion. >The only things I've >>mentioned on there are my decision to branch the Radeon driver >>and to contribute stuff back to the XFree86 project. > >And this would have to be approved by the same said Radeon maintainer. >I am not sure what that woould buy you. I fail to see how I need to get "approval" to branch source code licensed under an MIT license. >>Or you could be refering to Kevin Martin. He works for Red Hat >>however, in our Professional Services department. He is not >>involved in Red Hat Linux OS engineering with respect to XFree86. > >Kevin is the Radeon maintainer, not Marc. If you knew more >about this Project you would know that. Kevin has been planning on calling me once his case of the flu is over. I of course know that Kevin has contributed to the Radeon driver, and continues to do so, however not knowing every single finely grained detail about a project the size of XFree86 doesn't make me unknowledgeable about it. I doubt that half of the people who work on XFree86 know half of the people on the core team's names let alone who maintains what. There is no simple easy way to know these things. I don't really think it matters in any case. >>I've got other ideas and thoughts too, such as the bugzilla idea, >>but I'm not the only one who wants these things. > >And who are these other people if this is not coming from within >the Project? I've stated it already several times. A large number of people in the open source community have indicated they believe a bugzilla would be beneficial to the XFree86 project. While some of these people are obviously just end users, and others just "me too"s, there are a fair number of people volunteering to help out David. There are a lot of people out there who would love to get involved with XFree86 project, but simply do not have any idea how to do so, and many consider it to be "an exclusive club" so to speak. Many aren't developers hacking on code, and so writing a patch and submitting it in order to be able to apply for membership isn't something they would have been likely to attempt. XFree86.org however has the appearance to not want new people to help out the project - at least that is how several people who would like to participate have seen it in their own eyes. I've tried to help many people get involved, for the most part working on code however, and some people have indeed poked away at this and that, many of them still are. Some of them have applied for membership, and some of them have gotten membership. Right now, membership is somewhat unneeded for the most part of course which IMHO helps things a lot. The opening up of this very mailing list to the public is a good sign, and I believe will make it easier for more people to get involved. For that I believe we are all greatful. >Why, as Alan says later, don't they just do it and be done with >it. Well quite frankly, it hasn't actually been attempted before because there was so much negativity against someone doing it that there wasn't enough weight for the idea to get off the ground. Also, it was IMHO more widely believed before that for such a project to be successful, it had to have the blessing of the core team. Without said blessing, if nobody was going to use it, then it would be a failure. I believe that some people still think that, however I personally believe that that is not the case. My feeling is that a centralized bugzilla will help more people get involved. Some people do look in databases and fix bugs for the heck of it. Case in point, someone just went through our bugzilla and sent in a patch which fixes all bugs in iptables (so I'm told). What this person's motivations were, I have no idea. There are many others such as Eric Anholt, Branden Robinson, and other distro/OS maintainers who have expressed a willingness to work more closely together on helping to fix XFree86 bugs. I am of the belief that even if the core team doesn't touch the bug tracker at all, that it will be a tool that is beneficial to the rest of the community. It would for example be possible for triagers to nail down bug reports to the point they are useful, and then have the triager themself submit an old style bug report to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or to the maintainer of a given subsystem - thus isolating the core member from having to touch bugzilla. This time around however seems to be different, as several core team members have now expressed that if a bugzilla were to be created, that they would be willing to entertain the idea as long as they weren't forced to using it. Many of us have indicated how it is impossible to force a volunteer to do anything they don't want to do, so that's not a problem. We're now being told "show me the money", which is a bit different IMHO from times people have suggested it in the past. I think if everyone who has expressed they're in favor of the bugzilla project for XFree86 is in agreement, that work can now begin to put everything together and get the kinks ironed out. And aside from all of the negativity and flamewars lately, I thank you and the others for indicating you're willing to entertain the idea now and see where it goes. Take care, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
