Hi Christophe, Sorry I didn't reply sooner, didn't read down far enough... Let me first say I really appreciate your efforts to work with EDF to open their software -- and perhaps the process for writing it. The "crown jewels" of Code_Aster, Code_Saturne and Salomé with the MECA modules are truly outstanding packages representing the state of the art in many ways, and an enormous contribution to the Open Source community. On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 10:27 +0200, Christophe Prud'homme wrote: [snip] > Adam, > > could you send me an update on Salomé: hours of work, amount changes that were > done, number of people involved in the packaging, communication with > upstream...) ? Salomé might provide some good examples of what should not be > done in such platforms. I will be cautious about criticism though: I want the > discussion to be constructive. I'm afraid I wasn't accurately keeping track of my hours while working on Salomé, but that work spanned about sex weeks of sort-of full time work between January and April, of which about 40-50% was focused work on Salomé (i.e. not waiting for builds, reading LWN, working on other packages, doing other client work, etc.), hence something over 100 hours. There are 48 patches named debian/patch-*, which you can see at: http://lyre.mit.edu/~powell/salome/ (see -7.diff.gz). The main people working with me were Thomas Girard on the omniORB 4.1 port, Dirk Eddelbuettel on OpenMPI integration, Alexandre Fayolle on build testing and "bug reporting", hmm -- I know I'm leaving people out. Though there were a lot of off-line replies, the bulk of the emails are in three threads starting at: http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2008/01/msg00004.html , http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2008/01/msg00017.html and http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2008/08/msg00072.html . As for upstream communication, I tried both support.contact@opencascade.com and marketing.contact@opencascade.com as well as the web forms of both Salomé and OpenCASCADE, with no replies. When I complained loudly on the Salomé forum, Adam Erwan replied in April. Sylvestre Ledru was very helpful in establishing contact with people like Vincent Lefebvre, Aimery Assire, who recently sent me a very long and detailed update on the technical and legal status of Salomé in reply to the attached, and Hughes Prisker, who a week ago suggested I wait until a planned early 2009 release before continuing packaging efforts. More than anything else, what has frustrated me until recently was the lack of information. First there was no way to contact upstream, then no forum for sending patches, or even any indication of whether they cared about patches. Then between the March binary-only release of 3.2.9 and the past couple of weeks, it was unclear whether there would be future source releases at all. I think I have some answers to these, which can be summarized as: upstream develops this, tests it extensively, and then throws releases over the wall to the public after internal development has long since moved on. The development process is closed, and due to client interactions upstream has no plan to open that process. So we should work with what we get, and not think about whether upstream is interested in patches. The EDF/OCC developers have every right to do things this way. But I think they would be pleasantly surprised at how many people would jump at the opportunity to participate in testing and development, making the code at least more portable and robust, and possibly adding significant new features. And binary-only releases for an ostensibly "open source" product are very confusing and frustrating. I wish you well in your presentation, and look forward to hearing about the outcome of your meetings. Thank you again! Regards, -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/
--- Begin Message ---
- To: Erwan.Adam@netcourrier.com, Vincent LEFEBVRE <vincent.lefebvre@edf.fr>, Aimery ASSIRE <aimery.assire@edf.fr>
- Cc: Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre.ledru@inria.fr>
- Subject: Salomé package pour Debian
- From: Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct@debian.org>
- Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:56:41 -0400
- Message-id: <1215003383.22543.70.camel@workhorse>
Bonjour Messieurs, (M. Erwan, merci pour ton message au Salomé forum de 10 Avril.) J'ai travaillé sur un package de Salomé pour Debian GNU/Linux (et Ubuntu aussi). On peut le télécharger au http://lyre.mit.edu/~powell/salome/ . Mais comme j'ai ecrit au Salomé forum, maintenant c'est impossible de packager le version courant, parce que le source code n'est pas disponsible. Comment peut-on obtenir le source code de version 3.2.9 ou plus nouveau? Le Salomé-MECA 3.2.9 était disponsible onze semaines avant, et c'est logiciel libre, n'est-ce pas? Par ailleurs, j'ai ecrit 47 patches pour nouveaux bibliothèques (VTK 5, omniORB 4.1, etc.) et autres choses pour Salomé version 3.2.6. Peut être quelques patches ne sont pas utiles maintenant, mais dans l'avenir, a qui doit-on envoyer les patches? (Si vous voulons les voir, ce sont dans les fichiers avec fin ".diff.gz" au URL au-dessus.) J'attend le version 3.2.9 ou plus nouveau source avant de travailler plus sur le package. [Pardon, je ne peut pas ecrire bien français.] Cordialement, -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/Attachment: signature.asc
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