On 17/07/14 16:11, Christian Svensson wrote: > Hi. > > I know this is an area of deep political arguments, but this will be > about how I think it's time to get rid of the dependency on OpenCores.
Hi Christian, I'd be very careful about going down this route. We go through the agony of forking every few years, and then find we have forked the community. The last time there were some reasonable gripes (lack of git support, lack of mailing lists). But it divided the community and led to a lot of upset. A few years before that a group split off to form BA Semi, and we now see the problems there as we try to upstream GCC, and find that some of that group were contributors. > I joined OpenRISC a few years ago and I have never been affiliated with > another project on OpenCores, nor have I ever been paid by a company to > do anything OpenRISC or OpenCores related. I'm just an open-source > developer that hated what happened to SourceForge and has also happened > to OpenCores. But this is a diverse community. Some of us do use OpenRISC for living (we were paid for the GCC 4.5.1 work). But that revenue allows Embecosm to sponsor ORConf - like lots of open source companies we do give back. OpenCores problem has always been a lack of revenue. It is why Damjan sold the website to ORSoC AB several years ago. And ultimately the support they can give depends on the revenue they get. > As I see it, OpenCores is a platform that receives little to no new > features and downtime hits productivity hard. That the donation page for > a now de-funct ASIC project is still up and collecting money, and that > the page has ads doesn't help me like the platform. Those are fair complaints, but the approach would be to talk to ORSoC AB. I remember the horror of the 18 months before ORSoC AB stepped in. The website was always down, and the website was completely unusable. You may not like ads, but they do pay for the servers and some maintenance. > Today I forked ~800 cores to Github.under the organisation > FreeCores: https://github.com/freecores > This removes the dependency on OpenCores and allows free hosting of the > source code. Are you going to keep them in sync? Did you ask the project managers of those 800+ cores if they thought this was a good idea. I know many of them are dead projects (as are many on GitHub, and on SourceForge), but there are also some that are not, even if they are not projects you use. What about the discussion forums (including the non-OpenRISC ones). Are you migrating those as well? That is often where the beginners first come in. > When it comes to the portal: > I have started to gather Wiki information and assembling it > on http://bluecmd.github.io/ > This is still a work in progress, but the end result is a Git repository > that allows anyone to submit a pull request to change the website - I > think that the low wiki activity makes this feasible. I don't want to submit a pull request that relies on someone else to decide. I want a wiki which I can edit. If you don't like the current wiki, just edit it. > Finally: The mailing lists > I would love it if we could kill the opencores.org > <http://opencores.org> mailing list and just use the openrisc.net > <http://openrisc.net> one. > I never understood the reason to have both, even after reading the old > discussions. Ideally we would just extract the subscriber list, add the > ones who are not on the openrisc.net <http://openrisc.net> one and be > done with it. I think you should regard this experience as a warning. We have two mailing lists, because at the time of the last split the two mailing list providers could not come to an agreement to merge. So we now have to post to both, because the membership lists are not the same. Having chaired two ORConf discussions trying to resolve this, we have now just given up. I can easily see this becoming a *third* mailing list. > I can pull a lot of this myself, but I need to know I have support by > the community. Don't underestimate the work required for a community of this size. Just looking at the OpenCores OpenRISC mailing list since last October, there have been around 450 posts, with 42 different contributors, most of whom are multiple contributors. At the same time there have been 220 forum posts, from another set of contributors. It seems that we currently have OpenRISC hosted on GitHub, which gives the version control the community desires. Do we really need to split everything else off and do it for every project. GitHub for hosting repos is good. Its website/wiki stuff is so-so. Its issue tracking is a nightmare for any project with more than 100 lines of code. And is this really what you want to do? Surely your interest is in engineering. > Sorry if I stomp on toes by doing this, but I feel like the world has > progressed in infrastructure but we have not. I guess having been through this twice before, I really don't want to face the pain. Could I suggest you at least hold fire until ORConf when you can talk to all the main OpenRISC contributors. That gives time to discuss what the solution to the obsessive desire of OpenRISC to implode on a regular basis is. I am not convinced that another individual splitting off a fork is going to be any happier experience than the last two efforts. It may be time to go down the route I have long advocated, which is a proper community organization, not controlled by any one individual. Given ORSoC AB have changed their CEO in the last year or so, you might even find they would back this now. The advantage of a properly constituted community organization is that you are much more likely to persuade corporate sponsors to support you. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Twitter: @jeremypbennett Email: [email protected] Web: www.embecosm.com _______________________________________________ OpenRISC mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openrisc.net/listinfo/openrisc
