On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 01:32:13PM -0700, Bruce Rothermal wrote: > Hopefully I will be the wiser on this because my group will be going > through this same process very soon and it is not very friendly from > what I saw in the emails over the last couple of days. On either side.
Actually most development is cordial and friendly on all sides. Parts of the process are cumbersome, mainly because of laggard infrastructure, and a small number of people have become very frustrated with that. But I'm fairly certain that if you read the following four documents you will be way ahead of the game and should have a fairly easy time: 1. The nuts and bolts of getting your project integrated. This is one of the places where we're farthest from where we need to be, but the process itself is not complex. This is also something of a high-level overview of the entire process. See http://www.opensolaris.org/os/communities/participation/. 2. The ON development process. Most other consolidations utilise similar processes, often subsets. See http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/os_dev_process/. The Developer's Reference is also highly recommended; some of it is ON-specific but it contains a variety of useful information including a glossary. 3. The ARC process. John already pointed this out: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/. 4. The Constitution, which describes what Community Groups are and how they govern and lead technical work. It's a bit abstract, but it's essential to understand how the community is structured. Note that there are efforts under way to make major changes to this document to better support and reinforce the kind of development processes required to successfully build extremely high quality software on this scale. See http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/governance/. I don't understand the assertion that any of this is "personally insulting" or "unfriendly" but we can't tell people what to think. Suggestions for improving navigation could be made to the appropriate CG or, in the case of top-level material, via website-discuss. Corrections likewise. If you just want a code repository you can stuff your ideas into at will, you don't care about most of this; you just need to get a CG to sponsor your project, which is a fancy way of saying that the high muckety-mucks in the CG need to think what you want to do is a good idea so that you can have your repository. If you want anyone to actually use your thing, you need to integrate it into one or more consolidations, as appropriate, which triggers all this horrible burdensome process designed and proven to ensure that the software we love doesn't become a worthless pile of garbage. If that *idea* is at odds with your personal philosophy, integrating into OpenSolaris consolidations might not be your cup of tea; consider trying to get a distribution to accept your prroject on a standalone basis, taking a private fork, or joining a different community. If the *implementation* of the process is found lacking, feel free to suggest or work on improvements. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Fishworks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
