The need for some clear definitions of some frequently used terms came up at the Joint CAB / Development Process team meeting in Portland last week. Terms like...
- community - consolidation - project - branch - trunk - release - child of a gate We'll be putting together some draft definitions and circulating them here for comment soon. If anyone has come across any other fuzzy terms, send them here and we can work on a glossary together. T John Plocher wrote: > Roy T. Fielding wrote: > >>At some point we need to make a distinction between creating >>mailing lists/forums and creating self-governing groups responsible >>for building products. Which one falls under the name "community"? > > > > +1!!!! > > IMHO, IAC! > > I thought I had a handle on this community thing when we launched the > OpenSolaris "ON Community" - a group of people involved with the > "source tree formerly known as the Solaris Kernel Consolidation". > > The proto-governance proposals floating around all made sense to me > when used in that context, though it was easy to imagine other equally > as useful interpretations. My "sanity test" was whether the following > phrase rang true: > > The community consists of the movers and shakers (aka maintainers) > who are steering, architecting, designing, implementing and sustaining > the codebase in question. > > This implies (to me) that a community is something bigger than a single > bugfix, yet smaller than an entire distro. My experience with things at > Sun leads me to associate "a community" with the abstraction we call a > "consolidation", and not with smaller "projects" or larger "products". > > NB: The jury is still out as to whether or not this association is valid. > It could be that the thing we currently have is "too big" to be a single > community, and needs to be refactored into smaller abstractions. Some > possibilities that come to mind are splitting out drivers, filesystems, > posix/gnu utils and the core kernel/networking stacks - each would have > its own community driving its growth, independent of the others. Or not. > > Then came the explosion of mailing lists and forums on the web site. They > were also called communities, yet not all were focused on things that were > directly tied into "identifiable pieces of code". > > So, for once[1] I find myself in complete agreement with Roy! We need to > define some basic terms so we don't confuse ourselves even more! > > -John > > -------- > [1] I think Roy and I are much more in agreement than it may appear in > those other areas as well - to paraphrase, we seem to be two vocal > engineers separated by a common language :-) > > > > > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > [email protected] _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
