Welcome to those who decided to have a look at this posting despite the highlited keyword in the Subject ;-)
Curt, I decided to write this into public because I think the FlightGear project in its current form, driven by people with the aim to build "something better" (TM), is starting to suffer seriously. This doesn't affect just you, in the end this affects quite a few more people as well and therefore the posting shows up in this very mailing list. "Curtis Olson" wrote: > Personally I have to chuckle quietly (just a bit) when I see we have this > "problem" of two people working on the same aircraft. That's a "problem" > born out of the success of the FlightGear project. Sorry, you failed to see the other part of the picture. The "problem" is not just born out of the success of the FlightGear project. The real problem which instatiates in the given case and which has been lurking around for a while is the success plus the growth of the project and at the same time the apparent lack of project 'maintenance'. This is the point to realize. We call you, Curt, our project maintainer but actually, due to your time constraints, the project maintainers job mostly doesn't get done _and_ you are typically unwilling to hand jobs over to other people. I'll give you just a few examples: - I know it takes a significant amount of time/work to create such an aircraft as for example the model of a Blackbird for FlightGear. Now, in this case, duplicate work shows up in the base package repository because people don't talk to each other _and_ almost nobody cares about making these people talk. This is the project maintainters job or at least the job of someone who has been entitled by the project maintainer to care about. - Strange things happen in the source code repository and nobody cares about expressing their opinion because most of those people who really care have already turned their back to the FlightGear project. The remaining people simply don't raise their voice because they're annoyed from being called ugly names by few project menbers who don't manage to figure that they left the limits of good taste in their wording far behind. - Last year at LinuxTag time Pigeon managed to create a Live-CD image with some Scenery stuff we luckily figured to put together in a last minute effort. It took you several EMails and several days just to put a short statement onto the web site that we could point people to. I asked you to give a second person write access to the web site in order to work around such delays in futures cases but you promised to me that such delay would not happen again. This year's LinuxTag you didn't manage to put a comment about our booth supporters onto the web site for one _week_. It was even _announced_ to you that this requirement would show up and you agreed to put the changes onto the site. - The TerraGear development is in fact pretty much dead because the single person who has write access to the repository, you, Curt, didn't manage to review valuable patch submissions and additions for _months_ !! On the other hand you refuse to give write access to the repository before you managed to review the submitters' contribution. Nowadays the real and only TerraGear development takes place at the Custom Scenery Project, http://www.custom-scenery.org/ , one of numerous FlightGear side projects that float around atonomously because nobody even _attempts_ to keep things at least a tiny little bit in sync. One word regarding side projects: Lots of well known OpenSource projects have a single main site and several contributors care for the different translations which are then hosted at this very place. Some even implement a fall-back to the english version for those pages who lack an appropriate translation. So for interested people there is _one_ place to point to. Many of these mentioned projects offer the opportunity for side projects to present all their efforts under the same main URL and under the same layout - still allowing these projects to remain as antonomous as they wish. At FlightGear instead it takes us one week plus several EMail reminders to put a two-liner and to small images onto the web site .... Many examples show us that the growth of a project, due to its success, is likely to hurt the whole project heavily if there is no maintainer who manages to handle this. Several people on this list have forseen FlightGear getting into such a situation and this has been mentioned in several EMail postings. Proposals how to avoid the risks that we face and implementations of these proposals have been posted and shown. Yet the situation hardly has improved over the past, let's say, two years because we still have a "single point of significant delay". I don't ask you, Curt, to pour more time into the project as I know how it feels to have very little time and a huge pile of stuff to get done. I just ask you to start handing jobs over to other people and to entitle these to care about certain jobs _before_ they start turning their back at the project. I'm not just talking about my person here, there are enough other skilled people around. To cite your own words: "This is starting to get ridiculous". Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. 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