On Thu, 12 Dec 2013, Otis Gospodnetic wrote:
Here's an example. Radu found Rsyslog github repo. It's at
https://github.com/rgerhards/rsyslog/ .
Quick comments:
* May be better to put under https://github.com/rsyslog/ and plan on
treating "rsyslog" as an org *assuming* one wants to add others to this org
* I could not find this with Google. What does that say?
https://www.google.com/search?q=rsyslog+github+repo
* There is no link to that from http://www.rsyslog.com/
* The README at https://github.com/rgerhards/rsyslog is kind of
non-existent. Good Github projects make good use of having a nice README
there and make use of the simple markup to make it readable.
* The README at https://github.com/rgerhards/rsyslog points people back to
rsyslog.com
* The README at https://github.com/rgerhards/rsyslog points to doc dir, but
... check out index.html:
https://github.com/rgerhards/rsyslog/blob/master/doc/index.html
* Can somebody easily fix things now without going through Adiscon? Edit
the README and commit?
well, they can do it without going through Adiscon, but they would need to go
through Rainer. Since this is his github account, the fact that he would need to
approve the change is not surprising :-)
Please note note note note note: the above are not complaints. I've been
involved in OSS too long to be like that. I'm just trying to use a
concrete example of why the Github effort may not have been effective so
far and a few simple and cheap examples of how things can be improved.
so let's look at what we can do to make this experiment work better.
the documentation needs to be improved, that's a weakness in rsyslog overall,
but I would rather Rainer spend his time writng code than documentaion.
It's not that code is more important, but it's that code requires more knowledge
of the specifics, so it's much easier to have someone new start writing
documentation than code.
I've contributed a few changes to both code and documentation.
most of the problems that you are pointing out boil down to documentation, and
usually not very complex documentation. The google results boil down to
documenation and links as well (since Google ranks pages based on this)
So, let's talk about what changes should be done to the various pages that you
link to above to make things work better.
where on www.rsyslog.com should there be links to the github repo? I would say
that they probably belong on http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/build_from_repo.html
this page is part of the rsyslog repo ( /doc/build_from_repo.html ) so modify it
and submit a pull request :)
I'll try to get some time in the near future to make a patch that does a better
job of giving instructions on downloading and installing all the dependancies.
the github readme documents can probably just be replaced. You have strong
opinions on what they should say, do you want to take a stab at writing
replacements?
I think you are focusing too much on the ability to commit without anyone else
reviewing things. Review is good.
The way that Linux development is able to do this is that Linus has been working
with people for a long time, and he has developed trust in the judgement of many
people, so when when these people send him a pull request, he can just commit
the changes without spending any time reviewing them, but he may need to spend
time on the merge if there are conflicts with other work.
Right now, rsyslog has this to a limited extent with the contributed modules, if
Rainer gets a pull request from the people who contributed a module, he will
probably not do much more than glance at it before merging it.
If there were more active contributers, in a codebase as small as rsyslog, I
would expect that we would end up with more people becoming experts in specific
areas and funneling contributions in their area to them then Rainer would need
to do far less reviewing of the patches arriving through that person.
But one thing to keep in mind, rsyslog is still a pretty small project, there
are a lot of things where changing something results in changes being requires
all over the place. The module interface changing in v8 is a prime example of
this.
David Lang
_______________________________________________
rsyslog mailing list
http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog
http://www.rsyslog.com/professional-services/
What's up with rsyslog? Follow https://twitter.com/rgerhards
NOTE WELL: This is a PUBLIC mailing list, posts are ARCHIVED by a myriad of
sites beyond our control. PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE and DO NOT POST if you DON'T LIKE
THAT.
