I agree with Steve Cohen that finding people to work on the problems
probably won't be that much of a problem. (Witness all the people
willing to volunteer to code for Subversion, and make installers, GUIs,
etc. already). I think the challenge Karl pointed out (and with which I
agree) would be finding someone willing to "own" the entire collection
of problems across platforms. This person/group would have to maintain
the issues list and mailing lists, etc. and coordinate the criteria and
testing and validation for such a "full-support" badging program and
process.
That's the decidedly "unsexy" work that would need some sort of
incentive.
Steve Dwire
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Cohen [mailto:scohen@javactivity.org]
Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 6:41 PM
[snip]
But is it really such a mountain as you, Karl, are making it out to be?
Maybe it isn't, if you break it down. Let the core group define what
the "whole package" is. To say that subversion is fully supported on
any platform, we must have a sufficiently simple (to be defined) way to
install it on that platform. The full package probably includes
subversion itself, subclipse (including javahl or whatever else we need
to make it work) or some other gui. Volunteers then sign up to be
responsible for one platform. Red Hat 9. Win2K. OS-X. (Maybe this
only applies to the "off-brand" stuff?) If the volunteer is successful,
the package gets the "full support" badge. Otherwise, some lesser
desgination.
My first venture into open source programming came when I had to use the
Ant <starteam> task to work with that version control system, which my
then-current employer was using. (I know, hiss, boo, brickbat,
Subversion's better, yes, yes, I agree). The Ant task was broken.
I complained on a mailing list and the reply came back "This is open
source. Why don't you fix it?" I thought, yeah, I can do that, and for
the 2 or 3 years that I continued to work for this employer, I was the
maintainer of Ant's StarTeam task. I did it because it made my job
easier. I got no support from my employer. I might have been able to,
but then my employer would have wanted to control my time spent on this
effort, and the effort was small enough that I judged it not to be worth
it. Eventually the Ant team got to trust me and my work. (I had to
stop when I no longer worked at a place that had acces to StarTeam and I
don't know if they ever found a replacement). But that was a manageable
chunk of time. I think there are people out there who might sign up for
similarly sized tasks.
Of course, more funding would help too.
Anyway, food for thought.
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Received on Mon Feb 21 15:45:52 2005