C. Bergstr?m wrote: > 1) I've had some brief discussions with those involed on the tonic team > and while I hear lots of things about bugzilla being able to accept > patches blah blah.. When will it happen? I think in general you guys > really miss the boat on what it means to build a community. While I > have no idea if Ian M. is the best person to help with this effort I > wonder who would be...
There is nothing stopping someone from sending a patch to a mailing list and walking away. However, as you are probably aware, there is still a lot of work to be done, regardless of project, before that patch can be used. As such, I don't think it's realistic to expect that sort of process for a few reasons: * Legal: I would never expect Sun to blindly accept patches to the project through bugzilla. For various legal and other reasons, it isn't safe to accept anonymous code contributions. That's why the SCA is a necessary part of the initial contribution process. It protects our community, it protects the code, and it protects our sponsors (such as Sun). * Review: The primary constraint in the past for contributions was people to review and commit contributions. As you might have noticed, the ON gate moved to mercurial not long ago, and community members outside of Sun should have commit access soon (if not one or two already?). Dropping a patch on someone's doorstep and then expecting someone else to cleanup their work isn't very nice. * Testing: there are always going to be developers that don't want to take the extra time and effort to test their code or don't have the necessary resources. The test farm and build farm now at opensolaris.org help alleviate this a great deal, but this is where a contributor needs to ask for help from others. The standards for integration into OpenSolaris are high, but they are there for a reason. > 2) I think community fragmentation under the current system is > unavoidable. If it wasn't there wouldn't be.. Belenix, ShilliX, Milax, > Nexenta and gosh... the list seems to grow every day.. I've talked withs > some of the lead developers in great depth and noticed a common thread > between them all. My gut feeling is that any attempt to solve the > problem would piss more people off than accomplish anything. It depends on what your definition of community fragmentation is. First of all, Milax is hosted here on opensolaris.org. Second, some of those projects grew their userbase outside of the opensolaris.org community. Finally, most of those projects directly contribute and interact with the opensolaris.org community on a regular basis, so I don't count any of them has contributing to fragmentation. > 3) Based on who I see already subscribed to the new list I'm guessing > those who != @Sun thought it wasn't too bad of an idea. I don't have a problem with the idea, but the implementation, in my view, is somewhat less desirable. > From what you write I see it like saying genunix is bad because it > causes fragmentation.. I hope in the very near future to be able to > offer custom developer zones, blogging platform and overall something > more than just an easy place to drop a patch, but something people can > watch grow and be a part of. Unfortunately, for the reasons I outlined above, it's unlikely that a project that just lets people drop patches and run will be successful. > I'm not referring to you at all Shawn, but in general It seems those in > power are more worried about staying in power than actually being > supportive in some cases. I'm not certain what your "in power" reference is referring to here. All of the CGs on opensolaris.org control their own projects, have their own project gates, and get to decide the direction of their projects. There is nothing stopping someone from starting a "kernel janitor" or "kernel newbie" style project here on opensolaris.org with the right CG sponsorship. In fact, it's something I'd wanted to do for a long time but simply don't have the time to do so. Cheers, -- Shawn Walker
