Re: stabilization & number of changes

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 03:34:35PM +0100, Erik Huelsmann wrote:
>...
> I can't help reading that you *do* make the division yourself too.
>
> Sure, you are in one office and full-time employed to work on it. Although
> you may not want there to be a division this automatically creates one: for me
> the only logical way of discussion with Karl is the dev@ list; for you it's
> to walk up to him. It is not necessarily bad and does not have to mean "us"
> against "them", but it does mean that opinions of those at CollabNet have been
> and are going to be taken differently than from others.

Historically, the four of us have been the ones to set milestones in the
issue tracker, but that is about the only functional difference within the
community. The underlying reason is that we're setting those by using
standard corporate dev methodology: what are we going to work on? and
when? The other people in the community work on things as they desire, and
if that happens to be in a post-1.0 issue, then so be it. You'll find a
lot of issues with a note that says, "not required for 1.0, but it would
be great if somebody wants to do this sooner."

There have been times when other people in the community have monkeyed
with the milestone, effectively saying, "I'll finish this by <that>
release." Of course, doing that on a volunteer / free-time / interest
means that sometimes it is really a few releases later :-)

As Karl responded, we happen to work in separate offices, but that misses
the point that Ben, Karl, and Mike *are* in the same office and can just
turn around and talk to each other. There are other "back channels", if
you will, such as the phone and an internal IRC server, that we use.
However, we are very sensitive to using those. Probably three years ago,
we made some design choices and just started implementing them. It was the
right design to do, but we hadn't discussed it at all with the community,
and we rightfully caught a bit of flak. Since then, we post that stuff
first. You'll find many posts from Ben that start with something like,
"gstein and I were talking..." But when it comes to the issue tracker, we
just make those changes since they are "in public view" anyways. It is
very easy for the community to tweak or discuss the changes that are made.

So... it's quite fair to say that I'm rather sensitive on the topic.
CollabNet does not want to hold or enforce any particular position; it is
best for us and the community to avoid stuff like that. There *are* people
who are "leaders" in the community, as with any other open source
community, but that is earned through respect rather than corporate
affiliation. People like Greg Hudson and Branko have been around for years
and are well-respected, despite none of us really knowing the name of
Branko's company. (we know that Greg works at MIT, tho)

Personally, I've been involved with the project for nearly four years. The
only other contributor that has been involved longer is Karl. Jim Blandy
started the SVN design with Karl, but he isn't really involved nowadays.
Even after I joined CollabNet, I continued to use my @lyra.org address
since that is "me" within the SVN community. At some point, I might
actually post with @collab.net when I need to ask people to send in some
kind of a contributor agreement, and that *will* officially be "the Greg
Stein who works at CollabNet" at that point.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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