Ridiculous. It should be up to the module authors whether or not they
want to develop in our CVS tree or elsewhere, and whether or not they
have abandoned their work or will continue maintaining it.
I have to agree with mej on this. I understand the desire to keep unmaintained code out of the main tree, but I don't think forcing the decision on module authors is the way to go. It also makes collaborative development difficult unless they setup their own CVS repository, and that seems a little ridiculous for a single module. It also seems a bit pre-mature to call these modules unmaintained. They have been updated as API's have changed and while there have not been significant feature changes recently, there is nothing preventing them from being expanded as more widgets features become available in the core. For example, the weather module is probably feature complete until the config dialog/widgets settle out.
If we really don't want these modules in the main e17/apps directory, why not move them to proto until they are either accepted into the main e17 modules or deprecated? We've already declared proto as a test playground, so I don't see a reason that people we've already given CVS access to couldn't put their modules in that area for development.
We're really talking about two issues, development and distribution. I can't see anyone having a complaint about putting the modules up for distribution on get-e.org, but by officially excluding all extra modules from CVS, they would get far less developer exposure. I know I'm far more likely to fix a problem in a module in CVS than one I can only get a tarball for from get-e.org. I'd imagine some of the packagers would have little motivation to work on them as well.
Not once did anyone ask the module authors on this list how they
wanted to handle this situation. This was a unilateral decision
driven primarily by Hisham, though he apparently got raster's buy-in,
and discussed only between the two of them while most of us were
asleep.
There was some discussion in #edevelop that I saw, but it was brief and I was given the impression that it would be left up to module authors.
Does anyone else see a problem here? These kinds of decisions being
made "behind closed doors" is not how an Open Source project should
be. Nor should people's work be removed from CVS without their input
and consent.
The consent issue is actually a pretty large one. We've never removed peoples work from CVS without their permission, just take a look at the AUTHORS files in misc. How long has it been since most of them have been seen? Some of them are kept in memory of their authors.
So why don't we move the modules to proto, and then use get-e.org as a distribution mechanism?
Nathan
