[Asterisk-Dev] benevolent dictatorship, or inclusive developper community?

Tue Jan 6 21:33:33 MST 2004

It's a chicken and egg type thing.  I'd contribute some work
I've done.  But why bother?  It will just sit there and
never get used.  If I thought my work might make it into CVS
I'd be motivated but I see the chances of that are about zip
So I don't bother.  My guess is I'm not the only one thinking
like this.

My feeling about CVS is that the programmer should have done
at least some private testing before commiting his work.  Breaking
a build is bad manners.  At some point the "powers that be" will
make a branch and work on making one branch stable while letting
development continue on the other.  The stable branch goes into
Beta test and becomes the release.  Write access to the unstable
branch can be quite wide as any commit can always be backed out
and write access to people who really mess up can be revoked.
People don't expect unstable branches to by stable but they do
expect them to build and run.

The current situation really is an invite to some consulting company
to start doing what RedHat (or Slackware before them) did with
the Linux kernal, package it up and market it.

--- asterisk at lists.styx.org wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:09:33PM -0600, Mark Spencer wrote:
> 
> \begin{sarcasm}
> 
> > > the only thing that i can think at this point is that
> > > mark doesn't want sip to work through nat.
> >
> > Right, you've caught me.  My goal has always been to prevent SIP
> from
> > actually working in Asterisk, because deep down I really just want
> the
> > whole project to fail.
> 
> \end{sarcasm}
> 
> > Or maybe it's because (a) I was on "vacation" for two weeks and 
> 
> Sure, but this is in the queue for some time. that particular patch
> was originally made at the end of October, and has remained
> substantially
> unchanged since (except for some variable naming) ...
> 
> > (b) nobody has brought the bug/patch to my attention.
> 
> ... and has been the subject of a thread on this mailing list that 
> was still going at the end of December. Come now, that's not true.
> I have mentioned it to you on IRC as well.
> 
> But this is just a case in point.
> 
> > > i am getting very frustrated with digium's "benevolent
> > > dictatorship" of this project.
> > 
> > Then how about contributing by becoming a bug maintainer.  You can
> talk to
> > Brian West and he'll give you all the details you need.  Brian and
> the
> > other bug maintainers get special access to get bugs through, but
> the only
> > way to "scale" me is to have all the preprocessing done ahead of
> time
> 
> I am a bug maintainer, but too many of the bugs just get tagged as 
> "accepted" -- as is policy I am told -- and nothing is done with
> them.
> But there is a bigger problem.
> 
> > (make sure bug reports have backtraces if appropriate, are
> filtered, that
> > patches have already been tested, etc).
> 
> Some minimal amount of testing must be done before the changes go
> into
> CVS. But, it seems to me that CVS should be, explicitly, caveat
> utilisator.
> It should not be guaranteed to compile or run or do anything useful
> other
> than to have people testing new stuff.
> 
> CVS code /is/ for testing.
> 
> It emphatically should not be the rule to be using CVS code in
> production.
> This is why releases should be made from time to time, as often as
> possible, of known or thought good code. People that run this stuff
> in production should run releases. CVS is for developers only.
> 
> > > is it time to start thinking about a fork?
> > 
> > No, it's time to get more people helping.  We *do* have a structure
> to
> > Asterisk development that involves external help but what tends to
> happen
> > is that people only care about their one bug or feature and as soon
> as
> > that's taken care of, they lose interest in doing the hard work and
> effort
> > it takes to process bug reports and feature requests. Only Brian
> West has
> > really stuck with the task, and he definitely will need some help. 
> If you
> > want to help, talk to Brian and he'll get you all the info you
> need.
> 
> Yes, I agree, Brian has done a lot of very good work and is a great
> boon to the Asterisk community. But from my experience, what I can
> see
> happening is, someone writes a patch and has to spend so long
> pestering
> you to get the patch imported into CVS that repeating the experience
> begins to seem a waste of time. So they lose interest.
> 
> As well, if CVS code comes with no guarantees, and people are
> strongly
> warned to run the stable snapshots in production, letting more than
> one
> single person commit changes becomes less of a problem. If someone
> commits
> something that's wrong, just take it out. No harm done. It moves the
> dialogue of the development team into the source code where it should
> be
> and out of IRC, which has its place but is not where everyone wants
> to
> spend their time.
> 
> -w
> 
> -- 
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> _______________________________________________
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=====
Chris Albertson
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
  KG6OMK

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