We seem to have some serious friction on this list recently. I think we
should pause for a moment and reflect on our meta-level procedures.
~~~
Version control
~~~
HCoop has had a SourceForge project since 2004:
http://hcoop.sourceforge.net/
We keep in our CVS repository there all of our custom code that's
non-trivial enough to be hard to reproduce if lost. Using SourceForge
has the great advantage of decoupling the safety of this data from
anything that we do to administer HCoop. Heck, they won't even delete
our data for us if we _ask_! We also have automatic notifications of
check-ins going to a SourceForge mailing list, also decoupled from
anything we could screw up.
As far as I know, SF only supports CVS and Subversion now. We _could_
conceivably switch to Subversion, which I know _is_ objectively better
than CVS, modulo legacy code integration issues. However, switching to
darcs would induce a split with 3+ years of stuff in CVS and the rest in
darcs, so placing anything in darcs at least deserves a discussion.
I suspect the problem here is mainly that I forgot to talk with megacz
about our SourceForge CVS repo and get him set up with developer
privileges when he joined. Sorry about that. megacz, could you please
create a file ~/.sfuser on fyodor with your SourceForge username and
then e-mail me? I'll go ahead and give you check-in rights.
Does that solve the problem? I hope that we can agree that, while CVS
is clearly one of the worst version control systems in popular use,
there are other factors that make it a good idea for us to keep using it
right now, especially since we're in the middle of a migration that's
costing by the day. After all, if we chose tools based only on
technical merit, we sure as hell wouldn't be using any UNIX variant as
our OS. ;)
~~~
General decision-making procedures
~~~
We had a recent exchange of admins going back and forth asserting that
contradictory decisions are the accepted right ones. This is probably a
bad sign about our decision-making firmware. ;)
Any suggestions on what we should do differently?
I would like to suggest that docelic, in particular, should watch out
for saying that things are done some way "just because." While this
might often be OK from an objective viewpoint, it doesn't go over so
well from an emotional standpoint. For example, in justifying use of
CVS, I think a discussion like the one I included above would have been
more appropriate. Different people might be aware of different subsets
of the reasons for preferring some option, so it can't hurt to remind
them and nip future perceptions of arbitrary will imposition in the bud.
_______________________________________________
HCoop-SysAdmin mailing list
[email protected]
http://hcoop.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hcoop-sysadmin
