On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 12:02:10AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 04:05:03PM +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> >Contrast this with the Xouvert 0.1 announcement[2]:
> > Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 05:24:40 -0800
> >
> >This release was either two months and six days, or one month and six
> >days, late; depends on how you look at it.
>
> I didn't go digging through the archives before writing my platform.
> You may be right. Most of our announcements were done via our webpages.
> Since we lost our entire edit history for those when the repositories
> got wiped, I can't go through and show exactly how the December 7
> release announcement matches up with "on time", but the whole team felt
> pretty proud of our schedule keeping.
>
> I believe that by November 1 what we offered was the XFree86 sources
> just before the point where they changed the license, made available to
> the public through the arch revision control system. Since we hadn't
> made any changes, we didn't stamp it with a release number until we'd
> made some changes. Internally we called it the "developers release".
>
> So, yes, we had shipping source code on time, but you are right, it
> wasn't a "release" as the outside world would consider it, involving
> modifications to the code, etc. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
> I'm sorry if you feel misled; that wasn't my intent.
Er, from the IRC log[0] of 20041207:
<SirDibos> btw, I'm havnig a shower now, then updating the website. should take
an hour or so. then we release to the public!
and later on in the same day:
<DanielS> can i just ask, though, to satisfy the cynic in me - what's changed
since it was a few hours away, a month and a half ago? :)
<SirDibos> DanielS: what changed is, me, Andri, and a couple others have
actually checked the source out of the arch archive and compiled it,
whereas 2 months ago there was no source ^_^
As for the Arch archive, yes, you announced previously that there would
be an arch import on the date the first release was scheduled for.
However:
-r--r--r-- 1 1073 users 20747144 Dec 7 2003 xouvert--mainline--0.1--base-0.src.tar.gz
This seems to line up with the theory that the release occurred on the
7th of December 2003, which is so far the most plausible theory. Which
would put it one or two months, plus six days, late.
It seems odd that you saw fit to pre-announce that there would be a
'hackers release' later on the 1st of November[1], yet didn't bother
to actually follow that up with a real release. This seems like
absolutely bizzare behaviour to me: why would you bother to
'pre-announce' that something would happen later that day, and then
never bother following that up with a full announcement? Especially
when you actually do that full announcement, and publish the sources,
a month and six days later. I do have a very good recollection of
you guys battling arch imports for a very long time, which was
anecdotally backed up on IRC to me today.
> >March's list traffic[10] sees your first post in months, in which you
> >announce[11] that there has been a long radio silence, and that
> >'Xouvert at the moment is the XFree86 4.3 X server with Alan Cox's VIA
> >drivers added'. There was no code behind this. Indeed, as you state
> >later in the announcement:
> >
> >I believe your statement on what Xouvert was at the time referred to
> >plans, not code. You mention that you were probably moving to the
> >commit repositories to fd.o; I do not recall this ever having happened,
> >there is no 'xouvert' group on gabe.freedesktop.org[12], and no posts
> >from you to sitewranglers@lists.freedesktop.org (the fd.o admin list).
>
> Our activities on freedesktop.org all happened before gabe came up. I
> think we had an account on pdx. We used it as a mirror until the hard
> drive crash, but never uploaded the second release to it. Noone on the
> Xouvert team was ever made aware of the sitewranglers mailing list.
> Even the existence of lists.freedesktop.org is a fairly new thing.
gabe is the same machine as pdx, and /home was preserved as
/home/compromised when we renamed it gabe after the reinstall (indeed,
it is still available today). I did later find the first release (as
an arch branch with only a base-0 -- only one commit, ever), in
/home/compromised/www/twiki/Software/xouvert; this was the old
http://freedesktop.org/Software/xouvert/.
As for lists.fd.o, it's just part of our effort to move everything to
service-based names; sitewranglers has existed since very, very early
on as sitewranglers@fd.o and sitewranglers@pdx.fd.o.
> The second release was real; we took the X.org sources, applied some
> patches, and ran it through a custom perl script that stripped the
> server code out from the rest of the CVS goop called X11. The release
> was downloadable from the Xouvert.org site.
Was it? web.archive.org does not show any reference to this ever, it
is not downloadable anywhere today, and it was not announced anywhere
(not on the mailing lists, not on the IRC archives that I can see,
not on any news site). Surely if it was available for download but is
now no longer there, there would be a notice to that effect?
> While I was busy stamping out fires elsewhere, just before the second
> release, the webmaster had to deal with some issues on the server, and
> made some changes to the website, including moving things around. At
> that point, lacking repository histories, I threw in the towel; X.org
> was picking up steam, and although there was still a significant niche
> for Xouvert, everyone on the team, including myself, was moving on to
> other life obligations.
Understandably. I'm just curious as to, if you disbanded Xouvert in
this way, why every component except the second release was seemingly
preserved.
> One of the (many) headaches that persuaded me not to revive Xouvert
> after the second release was the design of the arch revision control
> system; setting it up securely was not trivial at that point in its
> development. That may have changed; I respect the abilities of Tom Lord
> a lot. If I were to revive Xouvert today, I would use darcs. It is
> vastly easier to use and administer than arch. Darcs is what Xouvert
> needed from the beginning.
This doesn't explain (certainly not to my satisfaction) what happened
to the second release: did you simply rm -rf the source? Your mails in
February certainly indicate that you strongly believed that no source
was available at that time.
How was the second release of Arch developed? From my persuals of the
IRC logs, I didn't find anything relating to development, only a whole
stack of unanswered questions about the development. If you could
point me to a spot in the IRC logs where there was some concrete
evidence of a second release ever being issued, this would be great;
my doubts still remain.
I did, however, find an interesting figment on the 22nd of
February[2], seeming to imply that you did not lead the project after
mid-February:
<nakee_> mrMister since when is Odin- project leader?:)
<mrMister> nakee_: jonathan had to deal with some nazi
accusations.
<mrMister> so he gave the leadership to herbert
<nakee_> did he accept it?
<mrMister> yeah
<mrMister> I think so :(
<mrMister> :)
The only traffic from you on IRC in the first week of April was that
you welcomed someone back and said 'woot'. Someone else said 'brb'
a couple of days earlier, and in the midst of this non-stop barrage
of traffic, someone else offered to make a logo (which didn't get a
response, so he left). None of this is indicative of a release to
me.
In open source circles, releases are very transparent: there is
activity and announcements, both of which happen over IRC and mailing
lists; there are announcements to news sites, there are tarballs,
et al. I haven't seen either of those for Xouvert's release two.
> >There were three follow-up questions (none with any real effect on the
> >project, just musings about X, mainly; although an answer for 'what are
> >you going to do now they've changed the licence?'
>
> Xouvert dealt with the license change issue at its inception. Simply
> put, we grabbed the source code from just before the license change.
> Was there another license change since then?
No, I was referring to the original licence change. Which happened
in January 2004.
> >Someone suggested rewriting the build system again.
>
> I did. I planned to use the scsh scheme interpreter as a build system to
> replace imake, cpp, m4 and make in one felling swoop. Something it
> would still be nice to do. I don't believe in XML. It is a weak and
> sickly bastardization of SGML.
Someone else on xouvert-general suggested it with something that, at a
glance, looked a bit like ant.
> >www.xouvert.org now states that the release slated for April 1, 2004
> >(sic; should be April 5), was 'the last release of Xouvert for now'[16]
> >and that all the developers had moved on. However, there was never any
> >announcement of:
> > * a release,
> > * a pending release,
> > * a test release,
> > * the archives being recreated,
> > * anything other than 'XFree86 4.3 with Alan Cox's VIA patches'.
>
> Yep, Xouvert certainly had problems.
>
> a) the commit repositories weren't lost, and never recreated.
> b) testing was limited due to resource starvation at the end.
> c) yes, we fell down in announcing the release.
>
> However, the pending release WAS announced long in advance, on the
> website. And the release was available on the website for a while,
> until things got reshuffled in the aftermath of a breakin.
I don't see any evidence of this from the Wayback Machine, and
removing all references to code seems odd; I find it rather implausible
that absolutely no-one, anywhere, had a copy of the source you could
even reconstruct from.
> >I read your platform, and attempt to reconcile your statement from the
> >first paragraph of this mail, with the history of Xouvert.
>
> I hope I was able to clear matters up to your satisfaction.
No, I'm afraid I still do not believe that the first release occurred
on time, or that the second release ever occurred, and my faith in your
release abilities is very low for someone who listed it as its absolute
top priority.
-d
[0]: http://www.xouvert.org/irc/2003/12/07
[1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/xouvert-general/2003-11/msg00000.html
[2]: http://www.xouvert.org/irc/2004/02/22
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