On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 02:21:15AM +1000, Mark Constable wrote: > On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 01:00 am, Daniel Stone wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 12:21:40AM +1000, Mark Constable wrote: > > > Seems strange, it's a major open source system that would have a > > > lot of Debian users.. is it because it's politically incorrect to > > > use anything QT based or something ? > > > > It's very, very big, and very, very hairy. Needs a lot of time, system > > power, and bandwidth. > > Sounds like a job for a distributed team of people and hardware. And enthusiasm. :) The problem isn't people with bandwidth, people with hardware, people with time, or any of the above. It's people with *all* of the above, who want to maintain KDE. > Other large systems also require major input. If it's ben left to an > individual with a large itch to scratch then I do suspect something > political about this situation. Not really. Ivan did it almost entirely on his own, and gradually shed packages. Ben B and Daniel Schepler picked up some of the packages, and I picked up roughly half of the application packages. He burnt out and left, and I picked up the rest of KDE, and agreed with Chris that he'd take Qt (Martin L ended up doing so), and KDE3. I worked on KDE2, got that all set, and then burnt out *severely* working on KDE3. Doesn't help when you've spent 15 or so hours in the day directly working on KDE, and then you have a whole community flaming the crap out of you for it not being ready. So, I burnt out and left. People come, take it, burn out, leave. Seems to be rather cylical, and I certainly think group maintainership is an excellent idea, but it's all about finding the people to do it. > > Take it from me, I used to maintain it. :) > > I know, I used your debs at some point, much appreciated. Do you > happen to have any notes or any legacy of your efforts that could > be leveraged by others following in your footsteps ? Step #1: Don't. Step #2: Your machine needs to be really fast. Step #3: Don't overwrite /usr/sbin. Step #4: sbuild is your friend, for build-deps and the like. Step #5: You need a great deal of disk space. Step #6: If you're in Australia and don't have the processing power to deal with it, and you pay per megabyte of bandwidth, don't take up an offer of processing power in the US, and keep scping debs back and forth. That's about the best I can offer, unfortunately. > That's my point about having a dedicated website, forum, wiki and > whatever together with a _team_ of people (as suggested by the > start of this thread or thereabouts) where the whole experience > of managing a large project doesn't die when an individual finds > it all too much, for whatever reason, and gives up. Well, there's not so much concrete advice one can offer, as just being there to help you out of a hole. I can't give you a list of steps to follow - just go in and have a bash, and email when you get stuck. > Both Knoppix and Agnula need KDE debs, did you have any interaction > with them to investigate an ongoing effort ? Er no, not yet. creadiv.de have certainly done very good things in the past by sponsoring Ralf N for his KDE 3.1 and XFree86 4.3 woody backports (a lot of his work also impacted on sid), and hopefully they have an ongoing contribution. If they don't, that's also fine - they've already done enough. > As someone who has been there and done it, have you any advice for > putting together a sustainable system that could survive in the > longer term ? Your insight would be very helpful. Well, it needs to be a reasonably close-knit team: if you have a "team" of four people all pulling in opposite directions, then you're never going to get anywhere. Using the debian/ dirs in CVS as co-ordination, with meta-information files, tags and branches, can't be at all bad - it's currently working for myself and Branden with XFree86. Not much I can offer apart from that, apart from find good people, please. -- Daniel Stone <daniel@raging.dropbear.id.au> <dstone@kde.org> KDE: Konquering a desktop near you - http://www.kde.org
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