Hi Andrea;

How to deal with distributed version control (so far I would like to
treat them as branches?) is going to be something we need solved this
year; indeed I mentioned that in my status report to OSGeo.

We actually have a smaller branch to try this out on in the form of
adding OSGi manifest information.

As indicated earlier I am mostly ignoring geotidy as a branch since I
have no say in its direction or development. When there is a proposal
I have a roll to play and will pay attention. Ideally I like the idea
of figuring out tough problems on a branch where there is less risk of
tripping over each other; however it makes the merge process more
expensive for everyone involved.

Jody

PS.  I agree with your points about being careful about branding (and
really want to avoid a situtation like with complex features where a
branch was run for years). I actually made the same point on the udig
list last week; also about the OSGi manifest repo/branch.

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Andrea Aime <[email protected]> wrote:
> Martin Desruisseaux ha scritto:
>> This bring the question about when geotidy can be offered for a merge with
>> GeoTools. Currently the referencing module is done, except for Oracle and 
>> HSQL
>> plugins of EPSG (I'm doing my test on PostgreSQL for now) and the builder
>> package, maybe to move in an other module.
>
> GeoTidy has been source of many headaches so far, at least for me.
> I appreciate the need for cleaning up the code, and I'm _very_
> interested in the list of improvements and fixes you've implemented
> there (I really mean it).
>
> On the other side, GeoTidy has been created on a separate repository,
> and managed by a single person, which makes it look a lot like an
> hostile fork.
> The list of changes
> (http://geotidy.geomatys.fr/build/tools/gt-migrate/changes.html)
> also says in some places GeoTidy is GeoTools 3, but there is no PSC
> agreement on it, it's a single handed decision.
> Also, to my knowledge no-one outside of Geomatys has right now the
> resources or the need to create a GeoTools 3 branch.
>
> I thought the plan was to make GeoTidy a replacement of the referencing
> modules that could be used by GeoTools trunk, yet the number of
> changes, removed and renamed classes seems to preclude a solution
> in which the GeoTidy changes are simply merged into the GeoTools SVN
> (that is, the place where the official GeoTools library is stored).
>
> An alternative path that seems promising would be to build GeoTidy
> a GeoTools compatible version that GeoTools trunk can depend onto,
> just like we depend on many other external libraries.
> This would also clarify once and for all that GeoTidy is its
> own library, separated from GeoTools, on which GeoTools depend
> just like it depends on JAI, Jakarta commons, Batik and many others.
> It would also fit very well with your intention to be the benevolent
> dictator of GeoTidy, preventing anyone else to directly commit on it.
>
> It also seems, and this is new to me, that GeoTidy contains also
> coverage handling classes. Mixed with your intention of being a
> benevolent dictator of your modules I find this very disturbing,
> as it would prevent Simone from contributing to it (after all
> you said at FOSS4G 2008 that you don't want anything to do
> with Simone, with various other PSC members present that can confirm
> what I've just wrote).
> This is very problematic, as from a GeoServer point of view:
> Simone work is what made the difference between unusable raster
> support to something that can rival with MapServer on standard imagery.
> Also, we have a very strong need for a more serious coverage I/O
> support that the "coverage store" proposal seems to match pretty
> effectively.
> I appreciate that you're open to work on that, but past experience
> show that does not mean we'll get anything usable in the
> year to come. After all, Jody's threading issues have been officially
> considered and merged into GeoTidy 1.5 years after he proposed
> them, no? I don't think we can wait that much, plus I don't
> want a situation in which you're the sole judge of what's
> good and wrong in a proposal, this is a community, and the
> PSC is the only valid judge on proposals.
>
> You've completely bypassed the PSC and the proposals
> mechanism for all the GeoTidy code changes, which makes me believe
> you're not interested in collaborating with GeoTools by its
> rules. In your own library instead you're free to do pretty much
> what you want, without asking other people and without compromising,
> but that's no more a community effort, that's no more GeoTools.
>
> So, whilst I see a viable future for a GeoTools dependency on
> GeoTidy as an external referencing library, I have reservations
> that the same could be made work for coverages.
>
> In order to bring GeoTidy back home it is my personal opinion that
> two things would be needed:
> - make all the API changes occurred in GeoTidy go through
>   a standard GeoTools proposal process and merge back on svn
> - accept the fact that the proposal mechanism in GeoTools
>   might overrule your judgement on coverage handling.
>   In particular, when the coverage store api reaches the
>   proposal stage, it may well happen that you have the only
>   -1 on the proposal. In that case after two subsequent votes
>   the proposed changes would go in even if you're the maintainer
>   of the module
> As I said, this is only my point of view, a PSC vote is needed
> to deal with this matter, but first we have to sort out a
> list of possible action plans, discuss, and vote on the best one.
>
> Btw, a shared and distributed community is one of the requirements for
> OSGEO incubation, DeeGree is having troubles incubating because
> there is a single company behind the project. They only lately
> went past that issue:
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Deegree_Incubation_Status
> See the list of OSGEO principles:
> http://www.osgeo.org/incubator/process/principles.html
> A benevolent dictator model is nor open nor collaborative.
> See for example GDAL, where Frank W. had to give up the benevolent
> dictator model for a PSC made of people coming from different
> organizations.
>
> One last hard question.
> You're a PSC memember, yet the whole GeoTidy thing seems
> to either suggest you're either not recognizing the PSC anymore
> (given you've bypassed the proposal mechanism whilst still
> using the org.geotools package names)
> or that you already decided that GeoTidy is a separate library.
> Which one is it?
>
> Cheers
> Andrea
>
>
> --
> Andrea Aime
> OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
> Expert service straight from the developers.
>
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