On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Frisby, Adam <[email protected]> wrote: > Ter pretty much summed it up - both it and the irc channel are fairly > low-volume, and the 'topic' is restricted to only 'personal' or 'meta' > matters; such as discussion of approval of commit rights. > > It's pretty standard practice across open source projects with more than 5 > committers for the committers to have a mailing list for these purposes, > since realtime chats aren't practical across timezones. > > Adam >
I am not sure I'd agree just how standard a process it is. The one's I've been involved with or otherwise have some detailed knowledge of, have never had them; including such big names as GNOME, Fedora, and Linux. For example the GNOME foundation list is not only world-readable, but anyone can join: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list . Actual foundation members are voted by the community at large. Basically the way they are able to operate is, they don't distribute commit access according to monolithic vote of knighted members; they have a system of maintainership, and each maintainer gives access rights to his module/repo as she sees fit, in a web of trust. One of the complaints one sometimes hears is how monolithic the project is (even if the code-base is modular). Maybe the move to git, and the maturation of the code allows more distribution and specialization of responsibility? My concerns with core mailing list are: 1. It's "secret", ie. not world readable. I can understand limiting membership to voting partners to avoid bikeshedding, but I can't understand secrecy of any kind in an open source project. 2. Decisions made there (aside from commit rights) affect other people, and they not only have no voice to represent themselves, they don't even get to know what is being said about them. That doesn't seem fair somehow. The knowledge that someone can read what you write makes you think harder about what you say. Maybe a private list makes the problem of disagreement within core worse rather than better? I haven't the faintest idea who this snowcrash guy is, but when I was a topic of discussion on -core, I remember not liking it at all. As for the issue of timezones, I understand that completely! Which is why I wish you guys used ML more frequently! :) My intention is not to bike-shed, but to be productive. Either opensim core is open to this point of view or it's not, and we move on from there. Cheers, and much love! _______________________________________________ Opensim-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
