Re: coordination? (was: APT 0.6 development: who to synchronize with?)
Hi Martin,
thanks for your mail.
On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 08:42:56AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org> [2005.05.08.1114 +0200]:
> > I don't think that the development was moved away from the public.
>
> Well, I haven't seen anything ever since Florian announced that he
> was going to coordinate APT 0.6.
This could probably be because of the sarge release.
> > The recent move from cvs to arch made the development more public
> > and a lot easier than it was before.
>
> Interesting statement, though I am unaware how arch makes something
> more public than CVS.
Please let me explain then why I feel it's more public then cvs. With
cvs only a limited set of people have commit access. So development is
public for people working directly on the tree but people without
access have to send patches to the ML or the developer (and that
happens usually only when someone feels that a certain patch is
"ready"). With arch everyone can branch and mirror the working-trees
easily (and automatically) to a website and everyone can track the
development. That's why I am pretty happy about the move to arch (but
I see that other people may have a different opinion on this).
> > Now it's just a matter to branch of Matt's main tree and start
> > working on a bugfix or a feature.
>
> In a chaotic manner? Without a request tracker, coordination wiki,
> mailing list, or instructions on how to proceed?
I'm not sure that it's that bad. Most of the stuff that was recently
worked on where problems reported in the BTS. A lot of the recent
stuff in apt are fixes for the apt-secure code that where exposed due
the big amount of testing it got because ubuntu decided to ship it.
> Note that I am aware that I could probably invest an hour to figure
> out how you guys go about it, and I certainly am not trying to bitch
> here to pretend that it's you rather than my lack of time, which
> have prevented me from working on APT. Nevertheless, it should
> probably in the interest of everyone to make it as easy as possible
> to motivated people to help out. Right now, that's not the case.
I very much agree here. It's hard to start contributing to apt and
that shouldn't be the case. Christians idea to publish the arch trees
of the various people sounds pretty good to me as a start. Do you have
some more ideas here? Better API documentation comes to my mind, but
that's a huge task (and some cleanups in the API comes to my mind too
:).
> And on a related note: I did spend 2 hours some time ago to review
> Peter Palfrader's patch for a better key management solution.
> I posted my results here, but I never received any comment.
I'm sorry for that, I didn't responded because of lack of time.
> If APT development is really about "just branch Matt's main tree"
> and get going, then so it be. If there is anything else worth
> knowing, maybe the responsible parties (Florian, Matt, ...) could
> announce how they envision development?
I'm personally happy with "branch and start working". With e.g. the
"apt-get install could install local package files, too" (#47379) bug
open for more than five years I feel that it's more importend to have
development than to have a vision. But again, this may be personal
taste and on the long run, we will surely need a vision.
I also think that apt is too big to be handled by a single person, so
we should try to help Matt as good as possible. Christian is already
doing a great job with his l10n branch :)
Cheers,
Michael
--
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo
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