Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
Adam Williamson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Pixel, if you're going to start distro wars, it's probably at least a good idea to USE the other distro first. someone told me isn't really good enough... Pixel or me have been using debian for ages before MandrakeSoft *Grin*
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 08:49, Buchan Milne wrote: On 7 Feb 2003, Gustavo Franco wrote: In one months or two you're doing: apt-get update; apt-get -uy upgrade.I can see :P We have 'urpmi.update -a; urpmi --auto-select --auto' (I have this in cron), and it gives me more than Debain does, unless Debian has XFS+ACL support in the default kernel and samba packages supporting ACLs out the box (just to mention one reason why no other free distro is useful to me at present). s/Debain/Debian/ I was just kidding, please don't attack my directly.I'm trying help here explaining some points about the Debian Project like Goerzen is doing. My two cents: You can do the same thing using Debian (no, it isn't the default).It's really easy.But can you run Mandrake on more than ten architectures? Finally, i didn't talk anything about apt x urpmi. bye, -- Gustavo Franco [EMAIL PROTECTED] p.s: http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 07:47, Michael Scherer wrote: Le Samedi 8 Février 2003 01:13, Gustavo Franco a écrit : But, I don't think we need to be a carbon copie of Debian. Debian is not the only volunteers OS project, everybody seems to forget FreeBSD, and other, or even some smalls os, such as AtheOs, OpenBeOS, and others, who don't work in the same way as Debian. In this case, you can try collect information about organization of the projects cited above, and nothing only about Debian. Well, I did, but they are far from being well documented. All BSD have a core team, who make technical decision. This provides conservatism, and they are sure that the goals of the projects are respected. ( this and some dinosaurs that should have disappeared, such as csh :-) ) I don't know exactly how you can become one of the technical chief, probably based on merit. OpenBSD team release CDs each 6 month, as said before. They maintain the four last release. I have seen a card with the location of the developpers, but, they are less than 20 ! They don't talk on how they add software to the ports ( contributed software, such as KDE ), or who maintain it. Read the documentation, here: http://www.openbsd.org/porting.html NetBSD release frequently, something as each 6 months, more or less, and the work is divided in 2 or more branchs ( 1.6,1.5,Current ), I think. FreeBSD works as NetBSD, but, they release less, and they maintain 2 or 3 branche ( 3.X,4.X,5.X ), + the cvs one, called current. I don't remember all details, so they may be wrong. You can check their website. As far as i know, OpenBEos is still in pre-alpha stage. And, Atheos was based on the work of only one person, who stopped it, and so, some project begin to fork and then to work together. I don't have take a look to this since 6 months, so this may be greatly inaccurate. And, to finish, did you know that Gentoo has adopted the Debian Social Contract ? Some parts of Debian are great, some parts can be changed, and some parts don't really correspond to the Mandrake's touch. Just my view on this. Many parts can be changed and we're working on it.Why can't Mandrake approach change with us too? Well, of course, why not. What are your proposition ? Mandrake as a new project inside Debian.But it was refused here, many feels involved.But if you change the original idea, try debian-project ML.The Debian-Mandrake can receive financial support of SPI as described by Goerzen, more and more developers, because Debian Developers automatically can help this new project...But it's only a proposition.Already refused, i known. [...] And, if it didn't exist, we still have the wonderful urpmi. I think this is the place to greatly thank François Pons for this wonderful piece of software :-) I was reading the source code.It's simple and functional in my view, i've some suggestions.Definitely, *it works*. ;) bye, -- Gustavo Franco [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 17:39, Michael Scherer wrote: [...] Mandrake as a new project inside Debian.But it was refused here, many feels involved.But if you change the original idea, try debian-project ML.The Debian-Mandrake can receive financial support of SPI as described by Goerzen, more and more developers, because Debian Developers automatically can help this new project...But it's only a proposition.Already refused, i known. Well, I can't see how it could be accepted. I have understand all words, but it still don't understand. If it was accepted, can you explain what we would do ? We've two scenarios here: 1) Mandrake as a new subproject: If accepted, you can contact Debian developers through two MLs: debian-project and debian-devel.To discuss about a internal merge with Desktop subproject or not and others aspects, obviously. The new subproject automatically will be under Debian Free Software Guidelines, Constitution and in my view some(or many) adaptions to Debian Policy will be necessary to cover it. 2) Mandrake Community and the SPI: First read the SPI goals at: http://www.spi-inc.org/goals. If the new Mandrake Community will follow these terms you can contact SPI members about your interests using spi-general[1]. [1] = http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-general Bye, -- Gustavo Franco [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 18:49, Michael Scherer wrote: If it was accepted, can you explain what we would do ? We've two scenarios here: 1) Mandrake as a new subproject: If accepted, you can contact Debian developers through two MLs: debian-project and debian-devel.To discuss about a internal merge with Desktop subproject or not and others aspects, obviously. The new subproject automatically will be under Debian Free Software Guidelines, Constitution and in my view some(or many) adaptions to Debian Policy will be necessary to cover it. Well, obviously, this is not possible. Maybe Mandrake seems to be only a nice installer with some software, but, this is more than that. There is the numerous wizard, working closely with the distribution. Do you known debconf? or cdebconf? It's a configuration management system (for Debian packages) which supports many frontends including: gnome, readline and dialog.debconf supports i18n too. debconf and the documentation: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debconf/debconf_1.2.23.tar.gz debconf reimplementation in C(the original is in Perl): http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/cdebconf/cdebconf_0.30.tar.gz It isn't a troll: Is any Mandrake piece of software doing the same thing? Can you clarify to me? There is msec, deeply rooted in the security mechanism of the project. I known msec and it's really good. There is a lot of customized software, such as KDE, the kernel, or xmms ( http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~gc/ ) And there is more, but, this should be enough. So , merging the differences would not be interesting, for all the works it represent. Yes, but we can share our experiences. Bye, -- Gustavo Franco [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
Michael Scherer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The difference must be who is a mandrake developer and who is not, and forget who is mandrakesoft employee and who is not. We should stive to create a TWO tier system Developer User This sounds great, so , now, what is the definition of a developer ? I propose ( as a draft ) someone having write access to some part of the distribution, this will include website developers, documentation writers, and packagers. How do we decide who become developer, what will be their responsabilities, their ressources ? When you say we should divide people by task, what do you mean ? I mainly mean creating sort of groupware database where each person todo is displayed. This will help contributors knowing that it is worthless flaming Chmouel not backporting 2.5 new hyperthreading optimization when he already has 10 or 20 more important things to do. -- Warly
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
Austin Acton [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I mean now, people are divided into categories like: contribs, club, installation, documentation, printing, Mandrake employee, paying club member, club VIP memeber, etc. etc. That bugs me. Somehow everyone who's contributing tangible work to the distro should feel like part of the same team. It should be easy to join the team, to find out what needs to be done, to tell others that you are working on that specific task, and to have your work added to the distro as soon as it's done. Yes, but we should also be very careful on what we accept in the distro, we should have quite strict rules not to make the distro go into a mess. How can we do that? I think that we could first try to summarize who is doing what already, perhaps setting up a website or using part of mandrakeone to federate all this. -- Warly
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
Stefan van der Eijk [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Q: when can we do that? And who will make it happen... There are a lot of bright people on the list that can help to make it happen. How do we first define an architecture for this. Produce a document first? We should progress step by step, the first step would be to create first basic organisation, then to construct on it. PS: Some friends have always argued that the debian way is the only sustainable way to go. If mdk is going to do it just like debian, why not fold and move the idea's and effort into making debian a better distro instead of duplicating the effort? I think Mandrake goal has always be very different from debian one. Mandrake is a distribution focused on user, aimed to ease linux access to everybody, and which is very reactive and on the cutting edge. Debian is more developper oriented and with a timeframe which is not compliant with basic users needs. -- Warly
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 08:21, Warly wrote: Stefan van der Eijk [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [..] Mandrake is a distribution focused on user, aimed to ease linux access to everybody, and which is very reactive and on the cutting edge. Debian is more developper oriented and with a timeframe which is not compliant with basic users needs. 'focused on user' as in end user or system admins? Wrong! Debian isn't developer oriented! The stability and portability are the keywords.Is much easy(in my view) manage a ia-32 focused distribution with newer(buggy) packages and flame about Debian project. bye, -- Gustavo Franco [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003 10:39:19 +0100 Michael Scherer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The problem is that if some people, ie Mandrake employees, have full control of main, this would means that we are not fully equal. Maybe it's time then that non-emplyees/contributors get write access to main. I believe Stefan has. If apache2 gets moved to main I could imagine to see Oden be (co-)maintainer of apache. Or Ben Reser to be maintainer of everybuddy. Or Danny/Mark to be comaintainers of wine. It could be set up then that you can send patches to the maintainer of a certain package. If he thinks it's good, he can decide with Warly, or with a team of senior people to give write access and (co-)maintainership of a package in main. I can imagine that Mandrakesoft doesn't want these changes to be too sudden, so maybe the upload script could do a check with rpmmon if the uploader is listed as (co-)maintainer, and if that's true, then upload it. That should make it that not every developer/volunteer can change every package. I also can imagine that employees/developers have global write access to main. So yes, the Great Divide is still there. I would agree with that, just let things evolve, there's no need for a revolution. (I hope) IMHO, the problem of contrib support is the lack of people. But, if the support team grow bigger, by including volunteers developpers, if the bug are handled by the mainteners, and if each people have fewer packages, this is solved, no ? You can ask contrib write access to Lenny, but this is not documented anywhere I believe, so the word only goes mouth to mouth. This should be documented. When you are a contributor, you have global write access to contrib. Is that seen as a problem? With the number of people who have write access now, I guess not. But if the number of people with write access grows, maybe the rules should get somewhat stricter. -- Marcel Pol
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 18:17, Michael Scherer wrote: Le Vendredi 7 Février 2003 18:04, Gustavo Franco a écrit : On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 20:28, Michael Scherer wrote: Well, we could try something like morethan one developper per package. Actually, in Debian, only the packager can change something. If you take a look to the changelog of any of our package, this is not the way it works. This works for debian since they have a lot of developpers. I think we should try something different for here, something more flexible. It's wrong! If the package has a security flaw, the Debian Security Team can do a NMU.In bug squashing parties maintainers usually do NMUs. Well, I know, but, it is only for security flaw, and since not everybody can correct a security flaw, it is better to have a security team to do it. I don't think I'm wrong when I say that is the way it work with all serious vendors. And a bug squashing party only occurs when the number of bugs is high. No, bug squashing parties are like parties.Occurs periodically at the freeze stage, any doubt you can ask at #debian-bugs (freenode). What I had in mind is something a litle bit less strict. Something more than the way that KDE works, with write access to a pool of file, for each developper. The association 1 file = 1 developper is not true for this case, maybe something like this should be tried. Something like ( this is a draft ) : everybody can change a package, with CVS,and the maintener choose if the change is taken in account, or not. In fact, just consider that the spec files of the distribs in the same way we consider source code for free software project. This not explained very well, I agree. Do you known about Co-Maintainers ? :) No, I didn't know. I don't know all Debian subtilities, only those some people have been talking about with me. But well, you can explain us :-). Or any debian developper reading this mail From Debian Developers reference: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s-collaborative-maint See, i'm an apllicant, i've some packages sponsored by a maintainer(developer).I'm not officially a developer, only a applicant waiting the DAM approval in the nm queue.But i've packages in the distribution! I would say this work the same for Mandrake, but, in fact, I don't know how to become a contrib mainteners. But, on the other hand, i didn't ask on this list, or on irc. I agree with you to say this is a good way to do it. And this is exactly what should be done for Mandrake. PS: Some friends have always argued that the debian way is the only sustainable way to go. If mdk is going to do it just like debian, why not fold and move the idea's and effort into making debian a better distro instead of duplicating the effort? Sorry, but i've the same view! Don't be sorry. I don't agree, but, I may be wrong. This is duplication, but, Gnome and KDE too, and , this is good to have choice, don't you think ? But, I don't think we need to be a carbon copie of Debian. Debian is not the only volunteers OS project, everybody seems to forget FreeBSD, and other, or even some smalls os, such as AtheOs, OpenBeOS, and others, who don't work in the same way as Debian. In this case, you can try collect information about organization of the projects cited above, and nothing only about Debian. To give a example, OpenBSD choose to release Cd of the project each 6 months. I'm a OpenBSD user too, OpenBSD isn't like Debian. Some parts of Debian are great, some parts can be changed, and some parts don't really correspond to the Mandrake's touch. Just my view on this. Many parts can be changed and we're working on it.Why can't Mandrake approach change with us too? Do you known anything about Debian subprojects like: Debian Edu or Debian Desktop? You can help with the new installer, called: d-i based on cdebconf and start a new subproject or enhance a existing one. Yes, I have talked of this almost one day each week with my teammate for 3 months during last fall. I don't think this is the place to talk about the Debian Desktop project and, I know that if I want to help Debian, I will be welcome. But what I want is to help Mandrake. Because, if I wanted to use Debian and to help Debian, I should have done it earlier. In one months or two you're doing: apt-get update; apt-get -uy upgrade.I can see :P bye, -- Gustavo Franco [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 15:17, Michael Scherer wrote: This sounds great, so , now, what is the definition of a developer ? One who contributes tangible material to the distro. Software, documentation, detailed bug-reports, graphics. I propose ( as a draft ) someone having write access to some part of the distribution, this will include website developers, documentation writers, and packagers. I don't agree, necessarily. A leading distro has to have tight standards. It's hard to get people to closely follow these standards. I know this from working with volunteers on the club. So write access must be given out gingerly. That's not to say there should be a limited number of people with access, but limited quality. That said, there must be a quick and easy way for new developers to have their work appraised, committed, and acknowledged. How do we decide who become developer, what will be their responsabilities, their ressources ? I dunno. How does debian do it? Maybe some sort of wiki system. That could organize people and tasks, and let new people sign up, and see what needs to be done. When you say we should divide people by task, what do you mean ? I mean now, people are divided into categories like: contribs, club, installation, documentation, printing, Mandrake employee, paying club member, club VIP memeber, etc. etc. That bugs me. Somehow everyone who's contributing tangible work to the distro should feel like part of the same team. It should be easy to join the team, to find out what needs to be done, to tell others that you are working on that specific task, and to have your work added to the distro as soon as it's done. How can we do that? Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca
Re: [Cooker] Creation of a community ( was : the end isinevitable )
On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 17:38, Michael Scherer wrote: We also need to support equaly contribs and main, don't you think ? Well, the problem is Mandrake says publicly we fully support the packages in main, but not in contribs so they do need to have tight control over main. Maybe a fair solution would be -make main much smaller, just core apps: kernel, daemons, drivers, main GUI -Mandrake keeps full control of that -make contribs much larger: include office apps, the smaller desktop environments -give developers much more control of contribs Then of course they would have to decide whether to ship a one CD distro and tell users to get all contribs online, OR ship some contribs stuff and say: CD 2+3 are unsupported. Tough call. You are right, so, changes should be check by others, by a senior developper. So, we need to have a team for this, so, secund team is senior developper charged of the initiation of young jedi. I don't think there's anything wrong with having 'senior' developers. This isn't supposed to be communism. But the point is that everyone involved gets treated like a developer, not a peasant. Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca
